{"id":330,"date":"2010-02-04T22:29:25","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T22:29:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2010\/02\/04\/on_transparency\/"},"modified":"2010-02-04T22:29:25","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T22:29:25","slug":"on_transparency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2010\/02\/04\/on_transparency\/","title":{"rendered":"On transparency"},"content":{"rendered":"

What technologies are so ubiquitous, so familiar<\/em>, that we barely recognize them as technologies any more? <\/p>\n

\nI went to the Libraries of the Future<\/a> workshop today. This is an initiative set up to explore what academic libraries might look like in, well, the future. Today we examined various global drivers, and thought about the effect they might have on the Higher Education sector more generally (specifically in the UK).<\/p>\n

\nOne of the comments made was that in a few years time, the current technologies that we’re using are going to become more or less invisible. Not that they go away, but that they will be so commonplace that nobody will think them worth mentioning.<\/p>\n

\nThis reminded me of an exchange I had while I worked for <\/a> (that’s much better than “”, which is how I tweeted it from the work account last night. Oops). I had rescued a Mac from Accounts: the company mostly ran Windows but the CSO was a Mac-head (which I think might be why he hired me) and this particular machine was said to be ‘crap’. I worked some magic on it and ran it perfectly happily for two years, much to the amazement of all, not least the muppet of an IT manager that was there. <\/p>\n

\nSo, this IT manager came up to me one day in 1998, and asked, “Do Macs do TCP\/IP?”<\/p>\n

\nI looked up from my email and my web browser, and said “\u2014”.<\/p>\n

\nThen I tried again, and managed a “Um, yes?”<\/p>\n

\n(Yes Virginia, there is<\/em> such a thing as a dumb question.)<\/p>\n

\nWhen I related the tale to my friend Nigel the email came back almost immediately, “My sandwiches<\/em> do TCP\/IP.”<\/p>\n

\nThere’s been a lot of talk recently about the iPad<\/a> and other devices, and EPub and E-Ink and whatnot, and we all, not just geeks, want to know about USB and 802b.11g and 3G and all that balls. The technology is still new and mostly not generally accepted. Not like, say, cars (it’s only the \u00fcber-geeks who get excited about engine technology) or tennis racquets or even DNA sequencing. Heck, we’ve been talking here about MT4 or WordPress or whatever. It’s certainly not a transparent layer.<\/p>\n

\nWe’ll only be able to say that the digital world has truly arrived, that we are completely digitized, when we use all this iStuff<\/em> to get things done, without paying a second thought to the technology itself. Rather like we do with books, in fact.<\/p>\n

\nI wonder how long it will take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What technologies are so ubiquitous, so familiar, that we barely recognize them as technologies any more? I went to the Libraries of the Future workshop today. This is an initiative set up to explore what academic libraries might look like … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}