Over the holidays Kari’s uncle Jamie, who works in the high tech repair industry, voiced one of his pet peeves: batteries. They’re the Achilles’ heal of modern, mobile computing. You’d think in 2005 (he said) we’d have a way to work for more than a few hours without plugging in.
Today’s NY Times has an article on that very topic—and the new social etiquette that’s emerging around the quest for power sources in coffee shops, airport concourses, and other public venues. (Apparently it’s acceptable for one person to take over no more than half of the sockets in any given outlet.) The unused electrical outlet is becoming like that rare low-traffic public toilet, the one no one else knows about but you. I was most taken, though, with the article’s final paragraphs and what they say about the way technologies regulate our writing selves:
[B]ack in Brooklyn, alone with her laptop as she writes a new novel, Ms. Davis said she had come to a reassuring realization. The faltering battery life of her aging computer now dictates the length of her daily writing sessions: two hours.“It shapes my writing intervals,” said Ms. Davis, an English professor at Baruch College in Manhattan. When her computer’s display goes dark, she doesn’t search frantically for a free outlet. Instead, Ms. Davis said matter-of-factly, “I know it’s time to stop.”
Update: In Archive Fever, Derrida notes that email “. . . is not only a technique, in the ordinary and limited sense of the term”; it is an “unprecedented rhythm, in quasi-instantenous fashion, this instrumental possibility of production, of printing, of conservation, and of the destruction of the archive” (17).
Posted by mgk at January 5, 2005 08:47 PM