A response to Steven Shapin's "What Else Is New?"

This is a reading response to an article by Steven Shapin titled "What Else Is New?" on technologies new and old. A great and interesting read.

This article made me realize how much my life depends on technology, whether I understand how it work or not. From the coffee maker I use to get by as a morning person every day to my laptop, which I could easily call “my everything”, I use technology everywhere I go. Thinking more on it, I also realize how much I take the simpler technologies for granted. They don’t even come to mind as even “slightly useful”, they are used so often, that they are forgotten. The various chairs and couches in the living room of our apartment for example, are almost ignored, (except for Adam’s ‘God Chair’ in the corner). Even the newest addition to our humble abode, a dark blue, pull-out couch found next to a dumpster on campus, has already fallen into the normality of the room, and I would never notice a difference until it caught fire or did something else to grab my immediate attention.

This brings the phrase “You don’t know what you have until it is gone” to mind. What would we do if emails didn’t exist and pneumatic tubes became the leading technology in sending messages and items of importance to one another across the globe? We wouldn’t know, because we are too busy in the here and now of this technological age to even care to think much into the subject. Even I don’t want to talk about how hellishly different and more difficult life would be with tubes and not my computer.

I need some coffee…