An interesting pair of tech-items hit the news yesterday. First, Adobe joins the fray to provide web-based virtual desktops. Google has their 'docs' and Microsoft has just launched their "Live Desktop". There are a few other similar offerings -- Ajax13 for one. I like the practicality of these platforms. They make it easier to collaborate -- Using the Google product, last spring I wrote a successful grant proposal with two collaborators and some technical helpers stretched over three buildings and two cities without any of us having to leave our chairs. I also like being able to log in from anywhere and to use the Internet as an extra cerebral appendage -- it's better than the olden days when I had to carry my work around in my pocket on a CD until, inevitably, it got tangled up on the kitchen counter with a mess of peanut butter or run over by my son's Tonka truck. But what I find even more interesting about the virtual desktop is that it takes my work even more out of place than it was before. I'm old enough to remember when all of my work was under the hood of my own computer. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when it was all on paper in a filing cabinet beside my desk. Now, I don't even know where the bits are that hold my recorded thoughts. As I type, these words appear on a screen in front of me and then eventually go somewhere else. Though I might be able to find out where they reside (to the extent that even makes sense), I'm relieved of caring. I'm liberated from having to think of my work living in a place, though I never lose sight of the fact that it comes from a place.
At the same time as all of this, our obsession with geo-everything continues. Cell phone giant Nokia purchased Navteq, providers of digital mapping gear to Mapquest for a cool $8 billion. Again, I can see the practical values of location-based technologies. It's great to be able to track our own locations on the planet. It's a marvellous efficiency to be able to track goods, vehicles, individuals, as they wander from one place to another.
I can't help but notice the irony that on the same day the tech news trumpets one development that helps to free us from space, another one helps to bind us to it. Through the slow evolution of space-bending neural circuits, lots of cheap energy, and some amazing technology, we have been able to free ourselves from space like Icarus soaring across the sky on feathered wings. Somewhere deep inside though, like an ancient Inuit trekker wed to snow and rock, we cherish and try to feed our connection to the planet, having replaced a keen eye and a sharp penchant for narrative with an elegant set of silicon chips and an array of satellites blinking overhead. We may tell ourselves that the geo-revolution is all about practicality and economics, but there's something more fundamental and much more interesting at work We don't stay up late playing with Google Earth because it makes our lives practical or efficient. We do it to try to re-connect with something we're afraid of losing.
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