i have finally finished reading fast food nation, and even though i’m now better informed about what goes on there, and more importantly in it, i must say that i’m pretty disgusted at it. i have tried to eat fast food once since i finished the book and i couldn’t finish the big mac i tried to eat; it tasted different. i wouldn’t have thought that a little knowledge could actually change the way something tastes like that, but it did. i felt almost nauseated the whole time i was eating it. even now when i think about it i get a little quiver of ickiness (excuse the quaint term). again, if you haven’t read it already, do so now.

on to the real meat… i’ve moved onto another book called high tech heretic by clifford stoll. i read another of his books a little while ago, called the cuckoo’s egg and it was very well written. this book, however is a cry out against the use of computers in classrooms, and to a lesser extent, education in general, although most of his examples and issues are targeted at primary and high schools. i worked for several years writing educational software and until i picked up this book, i never even considered the possibility that having computers in a classroom would be anything but great. stoll is giving me a quick hard slap to get my viewpoint back to neutral where i can look at both sides with a more even judgment, and he makes some extremely compelling and very lucid arguments. as i’m working through this book, i had a very interesting conversation with an old friend of mine (in this case, i say old friend because i have known him for almost 10 years, even though we have never met in person. – how alien a thought that would be to someone of my parent’s generation). we are both young (~30) technical professionals, and we both are coming to realize that the role that computers are starting to play in our lives represents a very radical departure from what it used to be, 10, 5, or even 2 years ago. an example that i put forth is this: a couple weeks ago i bought a computer game from the bargain bin at a local store. i wanted to go home, try it out, and play for an hour or two. if i had a device that was designed as a tool to perform this task, then it would have been simple. fire it up. pop in the disc. play. instead, i spent 2 hours checking the requirements. installing. installing drivers. installing directx. tweaking. and swearing because it didn’t work. i was ready to chuck my pc and go buy a playstation. that was where the idea took root. i had previously looked down on game consoles in general, thinking that they were for the ‘less technically skilled’ (i’m just now realizing how elitist that sounds), and that they were somewhat beneath me. the more i thought about it, the more i realized that if i was tweaking, or playing around with my computer, that’s fine, as long as i’m doing it just for the sake of itself. when the time comes to run a game, or an application, then i want it to just work, instead of having to muck through an hour or more of setup. i want a computer to be just a tool that performs the functions that i require. as i was discussing this with my friend, i started to consider that that was one of the things that i really, really like about my macintosh. i don’t have to fiddle. i don’t have to look for hidden settings, or do anything like that. i click, the program installs. i click, the whole os updates itself. if i need a shell, it’s there. it’s really so much more usable than my pc. back to the computers in classrooms thought: a child has a huge amount of exposure to the internet, and within 10 years it will be integrated so deeply into our culture that it’s possible that the next generation of people won’t know what it’s like to function without it. i don’t think i like that idea. i don’t like the thought of my daughter being completely integrated with computers from such an early age. i know that when i started to ‘really’ get into computers, around age 13 or so, i threw myself head first in them, and it’s really only this year, at age 28 that i’m starting to come out and see that while there’s a lot of cool stuff there, that there is so much more. i also worry that with so much emphasis being put on our ‘bright shiny new future’ that we are going to lose sight of things that are or were considered so important just a few years ago. how many people do you know that are studying latin, or archaeology? how much knowledge that has been passed down for hundreds or thousands of years is going to be lost in the next 50 years? what’s more, i’m concerned with the availability of the internet. on the net, every single idea is instantly available, and with no regard to quality of content as recently as 50 or 100 years ago, books were still reasonably hard to come by for the most part, and any type of knowledge that had been handed down in written form was carefully chosen, thought about, deliberated over, and chosen to be in print. now, anyone with any idea can put up a web site, or make his ideas known, and it could be available forever. that thought really scares me. i realize that i’m rambling and this is pretty long so i’ll leave off here. ask anyone of your parents generation about the holocaust. they may have been alive, and have their own memories, but more likely they have learned about it, from books and people, and it has a very strong impressions about it. next think about your own impressions of the holocaust, ones that aren’t drawn from schindler’s list. now ask someone you know that is 10 or 15 years old. do they even know what it is? in hong kong, people were using nazi memorabilia and images as part of a marketing campaign. a marketing campaign for clothes. just think about that. a brutal reign of terror in europe, 6 million jews slaughtered because of a madman. hmm, just the thing we want to represent our fall line, right? sigh.

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