the hypocrisy of me

This will be another adventure in exploring the hypocrisy that is me.

In my “I don’t want this sign anymore” post I ranted for a bit about the possibility that the convenience and helpful nature of modern technology might be contributing to a downward spiral in our ability to do things for ourselves.  As my little blog kingdom is still relatively new that has been the only major time where I’ve hinted at my distaste/dislike/distrust of a lot of the “modern marvels” that technology is giving us.  For those who know me personally they are more familiar with my rantings and ramblings on the subject.

Progress is good.  Inventiveness is good.  Striving to find better, more efficient, smarter ways to do things is good.  But, doing these things at the detriment to our own ability to reason and function?  Yeah, that’s less good. 

But, don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate technology, I don’t distrust all new gizmos and gadgets that come out, and I certainly appreciate a lot of the miracles that technology has provided to improve our quality of life.

And, occasionally technology creates something that doesn’t improve our quality of life (per se) but is still awesome.  (I tried to think of a better word to use there, but “Awesome” seemed to fit the best.  So there you go.  Judge me if ou want.)  Last night I found myself uttering the words “technology is so cool,” and immediately realising what I had said felt I need to share with all of you this example of my hypocrisy.

I had a story I wanted to share with my cousin, who lives in Norway, and I live in California…  and I didn’t want to share the story via email, or twitter, or in a blog post.  That pretty much left a phone call as the only feasible mode of communication, but with the international charges on cell phones and my lack of a “home” phone, those choices were a bit limited too.  Enter Skype.

My wife and I have used Skype before to chat with her sister while she was walkabout down under.  And I use Skype occasionally to share game watching experiences with my brother who lives in Arizona.  So, using it isn’t something new to me.  But, when I got off the video call yesterday it still hit me how awesome technology can be.

I got to have a face to face conversation with someone 9 hours ahead of me and on a completely different continent.  How is that possible?  How did that technology come about?  How, yeah I’m going to say it again, awesome is that? Praise computers, the internet, and Skype!

So, yeah, I guess I’m only critical of technology when it suits my purposes.  I’m okay with that.