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Showing posts from February, 2013

Old Objects of Desire

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There is simultaneously something sad and laughable about the sight of redundant technology being thrown away. These old plastic and metal boxes, most of them that off-white grey that was so popular for a while, tumbled together in a skip or a dustbin. How clunky and huge they seem, how ridiculously inefficient and pathetically low in capacity. That shoebox-like cabinet that used to sit on someone's desk with a total storage of 100MB, an amount of data that would now fit into something the size of a toenail clipping ten times over. How far we have come in such a relatively short space of time. And yet in a way this old tech is also oddly exciting. When we look at it we remember how not that long ago such a thing was an object of desire. That it epitomised bold new developments in technology that seemed so groundbreaking and enviable. That hand-held scanner that I was so desperate for in the early nineties that looked like a bizarre hybrid of a torch and a miniature vacuum cl