Notes From Xi'an 西安随感

This Note actually has nothing really to do with Xi’an apart from the fact I am writing it, on a MacBook, in Xi’an, and that I am using a Xi’an based wireless Internet connection. This Note is also not an obituary for Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday, nor a hallelujah for the Apple products he has bequeathed us, though, I like them. This Note does, however, offer a bit of context to his passing. It also gives me an opportunity to share some of my concerns about the omnipresence of multimedia devices in our lives today. First, a note from Ai Wei Wei, taken from Edge.org’s timely annual question -  How Is The Internet Changing The Way You Think?:

“I only think on the Internet anymore. My thinking is now divided into on the net and off the net. If I’m not on the net, I don’t think that much; when I’m on the net, I start to think. In this way, my thinking becomes always part of something else.”

I will offer some context to Steve Jobs’s passing by way of a link to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in The New Yorker: the opening paragraphs of which I will include below. Gladwell outlines the evolution of the mouse, the printer and Apple’s personal computer. In his interesting piece Gladwell focuses on the personalities and environments involved in the development of these products. From it we understand the determination, ingenuity and passion that different types of people, with different motivations, all harnessed to produce technological advances most of us could never have dreamt of.

image taken from itechfuture.com

Malcolm Gladwell – Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and Creation of the Mouse from The New Yorker May 2011:

“In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox Parc. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

Xerox Parc was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus.

All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. A visitor to Parc, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth…” The New Yorker

Whatever peoples’ take on Steve Jobs and Apple, his work has directly or indirectly influenced most personal computers, mp3s and mobile phone products on the market today, and thus all of us as consumers. Jobs’ passing provides a timely reminder of how the last 40 years of technological development have changed our lives, for both good and bad.

Personal computers are becoming increasingly smaller, more powerful and more ubiquitous; mobile phones are themselves now forms of personal computer. Add to this the variety of software that is now out there; the number of apps; the choice of games, and it is hardly surprising that time spent on personal computers is becoming a major part of people’s days.

There are questions to be asked about where this is all going. Most importantly, what is the nature of our own individual relationships to these devices and the wider world beyond them? Our lives are increasingly spent going online and into web-based social forums with new forms of communication being created all the time. In doing so, we are diluting previous forms of social activity and interaction.

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