Posted on 28 October 2012.
With the new release of Windows 8, Microsoft Surface, iPad Mini, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the citizens of Tech-savvy-ville have made their statement of prospection: We want it fast. We want it easy. We want it convenient.
If you look around the world of computing now, moving at its fastest rate in history, you will realize that the trend of technology is heading toward simplicity and performance that pushes the limit.
Especially among personal computers, where the market for tablets, computers, smartphones, and the hybrid of these are growing with strong demands, designers and engineers are creating and improving savvy gadgets to meet the needs of consumers worldwide.
In order to further expand their market, developers are simplifying the interface of these gadgets so companies can cater to a wider set of audience; your grandma would know how to drive a tablet computer or a gaming console without reading the user manual. For instance, swipe-to-unlock, click-to-share? who doesn?t know how to do that?
Tabs or tiles, we let our fingers dance around many touch-screen computers without realizing how this ?tabbing? culture has impacted our lifestyles significantly.
Our perception and expectation for most analog and digital mechanisms are determined by our exchanges with the user interfaces (UI) on these devices.
Close your eyes for a moment and visualize an open window (I mean the window on your computer, not the real window) with a picture gallery, and imagine that you are about to move from one picture to the next, which way do you swipe? Correct, you swipe to the left, and the new picture comes in from the right.
Borrowed from the book-flipping mechanism, this UI experience is engraved into our bones.
But did you know that traditional Chinese and Japanese books flip from left to right? But dominant software developers and UI designers couldn?t pay less attention to that, though Chinese people do make up a considerably large market in this business.
In a sense, the right-to-left scheme is already a world phenomenon. It is applicable to every new device that will be invented hereinafter; an example would be the latest Windows 8-supported Surface. Of course, there are other mechanisms that are becoming dominant in our culture: the pinch-to-enlarge-or-minimize, click-and-hold-to-select, and swipe-to-scroll, etc. Our index fingers have never been so useful, ever.
Lo and behold, that?s the least of a harmful effect that new technology has had on us. Unknowingly, modern technology is changing the way our brain works, Dr. Susan Greenfield said.
?Unless we wake up to the damage that the gadget-filled, pharmaceutically-enhanced 21st century is doing to our brains, we could be sleepwalking towards a future in which neuro-chip technology blurs the line between living and non-living machines, and between our bodies and the outside world,? said the neuroscientist.
Everyone who uses the computer keyboard long enough knows where most of the letters are located on the typing machine. The way our brain remembers finger movement over time, without any major effort, resembles that of remembering the keys on a piano. Take away the keyboard and the piano, a veteran user can still imagine the positions of the keys. Applying similar structure to the usage of touch-screen computers, we will soon want to apply the ?tabbing? interface into all of our lifestyles. In the near future we will want everyday things to interact with us through touch ? books, cars, silverware, whatever. It is frightening to think that technology is already producing a marked shift in the way we think and behave, especially among the young.
?I mustn?t, however, be too censorious, because what I?m talking about is pleasure. For some, pleasure means wine, women and song; for others, more recently, sex, drugs and rock ?n? roll; and for millions today, endless hours at the computer console,? Greenfield said.
An example of these changes can be observed in our levels of patience. I want to be completely honest here: my measure for patience is equivalent to the lapse time needed to open up a new webpage: anything beyond three to five seconds is considered too slow for me (some may say I am too optimistic on this). Hence, you cannot imagine how I grumpy I feel every morning at the coffee shop queue. I seriously wish that there were an app for coffee making!
Having said all these, my point is, we should constantly remind ourselves of the impact every new technology can have on us.
As I have always said, there is no turning back now; all we can do is to try balancing our technological consumptions with more humanistic activities. After all, speed, user-friendliness, and convenience aren?t the only things that matter in life.
As philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted, ?The slow arrow of beauty: the most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly.?
To see the beauty of life, we need to slow down our pace by a little.
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