Memorial Day weekend. Tampa’s Ybor City. A good friend and I are enjoying ourselves at a small Irish pub hidden on the second floor of an old-looking building. From below us the bass rhythms of some obnoxiously overplayed hip-hop song shakes our barstools. We’re having a great time. In fact, everybody is having a great time. The liberally freckled tomboy Irish bartendress is arm-wrestling with a large patron, and winning. At the far end of the bar a soon-to-be-married bachelorette is standing on the bar asking if anyone has a condom. The other bartender, sporting a sharp kelly-green St.Patty’s day Red Sox jersey is possibly the most drunk person in the joint. I’ll order my next cocktail from him. This place is perfection, and this scene is timeless. Nothing other than our individual faces separate us from counterparts having the same good time 50 years ago.

It is my curse at times like these to end up thinking about computers. In this case pondering how noticeably absent they are. The cash registers are the old kind with the mechanical display and typewriter keys. There must be a credit card reader somewhere but I can’t see it. No one at the bar is on their cell phone either; apparently there is life without mobile communications.

And like I said, this place is perfect.

The automobile and the telephone changed the way people lived, not life itself. Telephones kept family members in closer contact but didn’t make them love each other more. Automobiles opened the landscape to the casual traveler but didn’t make us more eager explorers. That’s the funny thing about people - as much as we claim to be constantly searching for the meaning of life, I think we might already have it. We know how to be happy and do it very naturally. We don’t need anytime anyplace access to AOL chat rooms in order to participate in a healthy, enlightening social event.

Computers will not, can not, should not change life. They’re tools like the telephone and distractions like the television. They’re the next generation of calculators and text books but they’ll never replace them. They’re a new and exciting way to make friends but they’ll never replace them. They’re a fantastic new medium for visual arts but they’ll never replace hand-drawn animation.

Maybe if we stop trying to make computers do things they’re not meant for they’ll start doing more things that they are.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2004 at 7:12 am by Philip Loring and is filed under Rhetoric, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.