Friday 20 July 2012

Pies and Paper

So my local deli/lunchbar/50s diner throwback now has an e-feature. There's a sign right in the window detailing it. You can order from them via apps available from the Android marketplace or the Apple store.

I'm still kind of reeling from it. I mean, this is your local deli. It's a family operated business. It's the kind of place you go to if you want a sandwich on the fly, ready-made and settled nicely into one of those fiddly hard-to-open plastic containers. Or a good old Aussie meat pie (made out of real Australians, folks!).

I guess what I'm trying to say is, who is going to download this app? Who needs to order a pie with that level of precaution in case the shop doesn't have any left by 12 noon? Generally they're already sitting there in the pie warmer when you come in for one. And if that shop has run out, there's a bakery next door, and another bakery five or six doors down.

Are these people trying to guarantee their own localised monopolistic pie economy by making sure they supply pies at a level equal with the town's demand?

I don't quite know. But it's making me think--we're getting to that stage of modern life (I hate that phrase, and look at me using it) where you're a little bit odd if you don't have some kind of electronic presence. Even if you just sell Mrs Mac's for a living.

In other words, the internet is bleeding into anything and everything. I'm imagining what sort of world we're going to live in when we're finally fully integrated--and I can't really imagine it.

For starters, there's obviously a limit to how 'e' we can go. Let me illustrate:

Currently, I work in a law firm, and while you'd think something like that would be all high-tech and everything, it's not really. We have a main electronic database, but we still send and receive letters by post. A lot of communication happens by email, but a lot of those emails need to get printed out so it can be referred to in Court. There are handwritten drafts of documents flying around <i>everywhere</i>. When you file documents in Court, you file three physical copies, which are then sealed and written on by hand. You keep copies of letters you send out to the client so you can keep track of what was just generated by computer and saved to disk, and what was actually sent. You keep copies of every document that ever comes into your hands, and whilst you can scan these copies to a server, you're also keeping a copy on the physical file. Photocopies of all sorts of things are made so that lawyers can annotate them.

We still walk around to Court, get documents sealed, and walk back. We don't email the document, or upload it to a Court database. It gets done by paper, and when you ask for a listing, they write it in a physical diary with blue biro. (It's always blue biro; I don't know why.)

Lawyers are anal, anal thinkers (for good reason!) and are thus very pro-paper. Since part of my job is to keep track of all this paper, I'm not quite so pro-paper. But my point is, you tend not to believe in The Death of Physical Material (especially paper!) when you work somewhere like that.

And thus, physical material is just not going away, because we're physical beings. Even discounting that, we are born physically, we sit in physical chairs, and we exist in physical space.

I tend to think that the Google glasses will probably be our last step into the virtual world, because it's the grand link between what's happening in real life and what the internet can say about it. After that, how much further can you go? People aren't going to want to stay inside a little bubble all the time and interact with the entire world via mouseclicks (okay, some will, but that's a minority). At the very least, you'd get cramp. There are some things you can only do face-to-face.

I quite like the Ghost in the Shell TV series for this reason. There are a lot of reasons I like it, but I also really enjoy seeing a gritty version of how technology and people interplay. Ghost in the Shell takes place in a setting that's all about being linked up to a network and having technology and people become almost interchangeable in terms of level of sentience. But at the same time, it is for the most part a very physical show.

Side note - I tend not to take the common sci-fi futuristic portrayal of one Net with one internet community in which each person has only one avatar (their real-life name) and they do and experience everything through that, because it's so different to the way things are now. Right now I know a lot of people with different handles on different sites, and even those who are mostly consistent and keep one handle for everything are still not using their real name. How could a mass group (i.e. everyone who uses the internet) turn away from the freedom of anonymity like this?

Answer: it ain't happening. Thank goodness.