Though this blog post is weeks after we’ve discussed this topic in class, the idea of skeuomorph discussed in Hayes How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Infomatics, has fascinated me all semester, to the point that I have tried to identify them in real life.  We also wonder why they would exist in real life.  For instance, someone created this meme about card catalogs.

Kids will never know the struggle  Image found here: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/54/a5/f6/54a5f6c0d167c0e4d9b7538fbcf2ef05–library-cards-the-library.jpg 

People lament the loss of card catalogs as if they lament the loss of a grandmother or favorite pet.  Instead of celebrating the development of technology, people want these antiquated systems in place, “just in case.”  You never know when the power will go out, they say, or if a computer breaks down.  You also never know when a society of rogue AIs and robots will use your society’s networked military to cripple your defenses and attempt mass genocide, as the Cylons did on the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series.

So the old card catalog tech gets recycled into other things, like decorative furniture.  Pinterest has many images of ideas on what to do with old card catalogs.  But why hold on to these things?  Yes, computers can fail and theoretically, one may have to research a paper during a power outage, and one may even see a scenario where hackers disable these systems.  But these can’t be the real reason why people want to hold on to card catalogs.

I think people are afraid of loss, regardless of where the loss occurs.  Sherry Turkle talks about the idea that “small sips” of connection do not add up to real “gulps” of conversation.  According to her, we are no longer connected to each other, but to our devices.  As our smartphones become more powerful and do more, replacing the old tech, one could theorize that we now must learn new methods of doing things.  We are making our lives easier, but that ease comes at the cost of change.  Rotary dials become buttons and then the buttons are gone altogether.  I don’t necessarily agree with Turkle that online connection is as detrimental to human relationships as she says, but I do believe that loss leads to grief and that the loss of an old way of life is something we don’t know how to grieve as a society.  I don’t even know how one would even bring up such an idea, except that maybe I do.

Kids say the darnedest things. . . Found here: https://pics.me.me/i-showed-my-12-year-old-son-an-old-floppy-5545571.png

I think that while there is some room to be funny, I think that with these small moments, one should reflect on not just changes that have occurred in technology, but in the way we actually do things.  The save icon is a skeuomorph and skeuomorphs are like Linus’s security blanket.  It doesn’t make sense to carry it, but it helps a lot anyway.  I think ignoring these feelings of loss, of scoffing at the idea of people who hold onto their skeuomorphs as talismans against the approach of the future, is probably making people like Sherry Turkle feel empowered in their sense that we’re losing something.  In a way, she’s right.  But by staying reactionary, staying within the realm of focusing on pathos, we don’t see the logos of what these changes mean in terms of advancement.  Looking in a card catalog showed diligence and hard work, and the idea that Google can replace this might be seen as a fall into slothfulness.  Yet, what is not seen is that we can save time of searches and focus more on using that research to actually write that book or cure that disease or find new and interesting connections among data points that we didn’t even know existed.

So if you want to keep your card catalog as a new decorative set of drawers, please do so.  I won’t laugh anymore.  After all, I’ll bet Larry Page and Sergey Brin spent many days using card catalogs in graduate school as they were building the future in their garage.