A few days ago at a team lunch, I was curious why one of the new graduate students, Luis Blackaller, used an older digital camera. He said that he had bought a newer one, but it was no good in the sense that it was too slow to focus. Although he had gained several more megapixels, with all kinds of new features and so forth, he chose to go back to not what was just old, but what was better.
Yesterday I began to work with a brand new digital camera and understood what he meant. Compared to my older camera, I counted 83 new features with 5 megapixels more of resolution. Add on to this the new amazing "anti-blur" feature so I can now wobble my hands all over the place and take the perfect picture. In theory, I should now be able to take a better picture than my older camera. But I've discovered that I can take an extremely high-resolution photo of much poorer quality than my previous camera. How does this happen?
Paradoxically by buying newer technology that's supposed to make me more empowered, I'm feeling less confident because there must be something wrong with me because I'm not untapping the potential here. My natural insecurities are copiously fed by the power of new technologies. I'm feeling ... indigestion.
I wish there were online stores where you could choose the year in which you'd like to shop. Say you visit an online store like outpost.com and give it the flag 'outpost.com?year=2003&mo=feb' and it lets you buy stuff available in inventory from February in 2003. There's all this good stuff that goes away and is replaced with new stuff that nobody wants. This also applies to websites in general that become unusable by adding all the latest Flash-goop and Javascript hacks -- I'd like to dial-back to web experiences that truly work versus are simply new. It would be like time traveling "for real" into the wayback machine.
I think I'm sounding old here ... but I've essentially outlined here that being old can be good. It's good to be old. Especially when there's no other choice.
Posted by maeda at July 8, 2006 08:18 AM