Casualties of "The Future"

the premium we pay for the next big thing is too high a price

For years I’ve been simultaneously amused and horrified at repeated efforts to replace the mouse and keyboard as the fundamental input devices of computers. Granted, most people use laptops and most people who use laptops use the trackpad instead of a wireless mouse. But a trackpad exists to mimic the functionality of a mouse and does so in a way that’s inferior to the original. Every trackpad I’ve ever used has been in some way finicky and annoying. (And yes, I used a then-new Macbook for a year while in grad school.) The precision of the mouse for hunting and clicking along with the ready access to letters and symbols provided by a keyboard just can’t be beat. Whenever I move from some other input system to using a mouse and keyboard again, I let out an audible “Ahhh.”

I’m particularly reminded of mouse-keyboard superiority every time I try to write something on my phone, which is an awful experience despite the fact that I have one of those giant-screen phones. When I was in academia, in the broad and broken world of student writing, there was a constant insistence that soon kids were going to write everything they would ever write on their phones and would countenance no other option. I thought this was dumb. Touchscreens are very handy for what smartphones usually do; they’re just not nearly as handy for inputting large amounts of text. And the students seemed to feel the same way, as these predictions were constantly defied by what my own students were showing and telling me about their own practices. But it was one of those things that the academics I knew simply could not accept at face value. And you know why? Because smartphones were The Future. It didn’t matter that they’re an objectively inconvenient way to write. They were the new thing, they were more tech-y technology, and so they had to be the next big thing. Writing is a technology, arguably the most powerful in the history of mankind, but it wasn’t technology technology. Smartphones were the future because they were The Future. The concept of the new swallowed the actual brick-and-mortar reality of which technology is best suited for which use. And this condition is generalizable - in our culture, the pursuit of The Future ends up swallowing everything.