Electric Dreams

" You can't work out the simplest thing on an iPod, are baffled by the most basic features on an idiot-proof mobile phone, and can't work an e-card website. Yet you blog widely, can write HTML and you design professional websites. I wonder if this tells us something about society's current relationship to technology, or is it just that you're a very strange man?"

This from a commenter to househusbandnot yesterday. I am not going to go into whether or not I am strange right now (which I'm not btw), but the whole relationship with technology thing is interesting? Why should I know how an iPod works if I can populate a website? Why should I be supper fly with my new mobile phone just because I can blog? It is like the whole fitness thing. I can currently (at a push) swim two miles of crawl in an hour or so. But ask me to run for a bus? Or cycle up a hill? And I'm dead. Fitness is very specific, as is my capacity to understand technology.

Part of it is the way we/I/software thinks I guess. The first software we used for this website I am working on I just couldn't understand. It was always asking the wrong questions, or giving me options I did not think were relevant to what I was doing, or I was asking it for things I was not sure meant anything - or were deeply significant. There was an essence in its design I just could not read. It was like talking to someone in a different language, from a different decade, on a phone that keeps cutting out.

And unlike other languages - you learn German, you can talk to most Germans -the language of technology seems to be entirely specific, and non-transferable - from gadget to gadget or old phone to new phone, or existing knowledge to task in front or you. I assume this has a lot to do with ownership of software rights, but I also assume it is about differentiation in the market place, and a desire to be recognised - or perceived anyway - as moving things forward. Why would I want to spent a few hundred bucks on software that was not going to confuse me. If it doesn't confuse me, then its true worth - or usefulness - is probably not that life changing or enhancing. (Am I making any sense here. I am speaking in hhntml.)

So, having established - in my mind anyway - that there is no logic to technology, I am out there/here just trying to scrape things together. I did get the new digital box for the tv working last night. I am capable of getting my phone to show a picture of mrs hhn when she calls me. But I still don't feel technology is working for me. I am working to try and get it to like me, or give me an in to its mystery powers. It's still a fight, not a cuddle. As a man, living in today's technology heavy world, I am trying to get there. But technology is moving faster than I am, and there are more of them moving it forward than there are of me trying to figure it out. (I am sounding like an old fart now I know, so will stop there.)

Although, in a blog-related technology query, how come Google has decided that people who read hhn may also be interested in advertising for a site where you can meet wives who want to cheat on their husbands? (See ad box, although it does change quite often.) Where's the logic in that? I know people spend hours of every day trying to figure out how Google thinks. But I don't get this one.