whilst i will admit to looking at it everyday for a brief 15 minutes in morning or at lunch time it's very rare that you would find me actually talking about or even reflecting upon what i've read on the MSN homepage. today a little article caught my eye and started the cogs of my mind whirring away. MSN has presented a short picture article of current everyday gadgets that could soon be extinct to honour the inevitable demise of the humble floppy disk. this comes as sony have announced that production of the floppy disk is due to cease by march 2011.
the image of the floppy disk reminds me of the excitement i felt as my family got our first PC in 1996 (pre social networking, blogging etc. 1996 was definitely all about the AOL teen chatrooms). we used to have hundreds of the things cluttering up the place with numerous saved bits and bobs on them...who knows what and where because they were very rarely labelled. but they definitely came in handy for when i need to transfer my regular music reviews for the school paper (that would be "Tamsyn's CD Corner" as part of the "Pupil's Eye" newspaper... i kid you not) from home to school. and do you remember the sound they used to make when you'd pop one into the PC and they'd whirr into life? oh yes. those were the days.
but now back to the present day where it's rare to even see a computer with a floppy disk slot. nowadays, it's all about the USB memory stick. i remember getting my first memory stick in my first year of uni... a 2MB stick that cost forty british pounds. nowadays you can get about ten of those sticks for the same price (with undoubtably much more memory capacity). that's in just 6 years. a small example of how digital technology is becoming cheaper and more readily available for a wider audience. the USB memory stick has gone from being an investment buy that i had to ask for as part of my christmas present to being something that i can pick up in poundland (and yes i have seen them) with my toiletries and domestic cleaning products. in a little technology timeline one would see the USB memory stick replace the recordable CD replacing the floppy disk effectively replacing printed information and so on and so forth. i know it's not exact... or maybe even true. it's just me attempting to apply mcluhan theory to my mind's rambles.
going back to the MSN article, out of the list of gadgets soon to be extinct there was one that particularly caught my attention. the alarm clock. despite manufacturer's attempts to jazz it up.. people no longer want or need, what one would assume to be, the essential alarm clock. and what instead is one using on an everyday basis to get up for work/uni/school etc? the mobile phone.
the multimedia/multifunctional capabilities of the latest mobile phones, or "smart" phones, enables an individual to access a plethora of everyday modern necessities. even helping them to wake up in the morning. this use of one central item to control your whole life be it your job, social life or personal leisure time is a trend which looks likely to continue. i wonder maybe if in a hundred years time our destiny will be one similar to the human population of wall-e?
fat, anti-social slaves to technology hmmm? what do you think?
and i think i'll stop that blog there before i go off on another trail of thought.
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