Over at Neat Living, Ariane builds on a riff that Dennis McDonald started at All Kind Food on whether or not technology can be used to simplify life. Both of them come to the conclusion that technology cannot be used to simplify, which I disagree with.
Perhaps my experiences are atypical, or perhaps theirs are. What is certain is that their experiences and mine are quite different. There are quite a few ways that technology has helped me simplify my life. Here are a few:
- By ripping all of my music to an Ipod and storing the CDs in the garage I gain not only the ability to easily take all of my music everywhere, but several shelves in my bookshelf are freed up by no longer having CDs on them.
- By finding a good cell-phone company whose coverage is strong near my house, I was able to give up having two phone numbers and use my cell phone as my home phone.
- By having an internet connection, I obsolete a goodly number of reference and technical books, and can reclaim yet more space on my shelves.
- Dennis talks about maintaining systems as a chief reason why technology doesn’t help to simplify life. I think that in the case of bill paying, it actually makes managing the system easier. For half of my bills, I have a bank card on file, meaning that I don’t have to do anything in order to pay them. The remainder are set to online payment, but for one reason or another (usually that it isn’t offered) I do not pay them automatically. In these cases, I click a link in an email, check a box, and click again; bill paid. No stamps, no envelopes, no bill paying/filing/keeping track of system to maintain.
Now, you could, I suppose, make a case that the above “simplifications” only serve to simplify my use of other techno-doodads, and in a strict sense, you may be right. On the other hand, music, telephones, bills and encyclopedias are pretty standard trappings of life, simple or not, and being able to simplify them is always a good thing, even if I have to use technology to do it.
Tags: music, technology, voluntary peasantry
These are the ramblings of 
Thanks for the comment!
I agree with all your bullet points. You may be misinterpreting my original comments. My issue is not with technology, it’s with devices that don’t add significant enough marginal value to justify the additional cost and time to set them up and maintain them.
This is one of the reasons why when given a choice between two cellphones on my last re-subscription with Verizon, I chose the one WITHOUT the camera. My reasoning: I already have a decent digital camera, I didn’t want to incur the extra costs of learning and using the phone’s camera and the images it would generate.
I certainly agree with your comments about CD’s. It’s a pity that DRM incompatibilities exist, and that’s an example of an externally-imposed complexity (e.g., the incompatibility between technologies such as Apple’s PlayFair and Microsoft’s PlayForSure approach)that reduces overall value and market potential.
Nice blog!
Thanks for stopping by.
I am not so much disagreeing with your original point as providing a slightly different angle on it, and in no way should my position be taken as supporting “gadget-itis”, which I am recovering from as well.
Multi-function devices are almost never a good idea, are they? In my opinion, the only nice advance in cell phones recently has been bluetooth. Less wires is always better!
I agree that DRM is a huge flaw in my “simpler” music collection. I now have two copies of every song; one on an external hard drive ripped straight from the CD to FLAC, and one made from the FLAC copies for iTunes in AAC so that my original copies are not infected by PlayFair. A good bit of work up front, but worth it in the long run.