*shiver*

I think I’m gonna buy a mac.

I plugged in my iPod today and was greeted with a pleasant error message, “iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode – Use iTunes to restore”. For anyone that doesn’t know, “restore” is basically ipod lingo for reformat that hard drive and reinstall the OS. Seeing as I have nearly 40 GB of music on this thing I wasn’t looking forward to go through the process of transferring all that music so I went looking for a work around. A quick search of Google revealed this page. Don’t bother reading it, it says essentially the same thing the error message said. But it goes on to say that if you continue to get the error after restoring you should try changing the drive letter in Windows. So I ask myself, why should I delete all of my music when the apple support says that might not fix the problem. Skipping step one, I removed the ipod drive letter in windows and assigned a new one. I then plugged it in and voilà; iTunes recognizes it without errors.

If I had been a casual user and followed the directions in the error message, I would have wasted the better part of an evening transferring music back to my mp3 player. Consumer technology companies employ this one step approach to fixing problems because it does work, and it’s cheap to implement.

What struck me about Information Technology four years ago was that IT is a tool, a medium for conveying information. There are two distinct parts of IT, information, and technology. For many people learning the technology is an end unto itself. I was like that for a while. I enjoyed learning how things worked, and loved building computers, breaking stuff, then making it work again. I also enjoyed the challenges of programming and developing. I espcially enjoyed working on websites, and played around with designing and developing numerous versions of personal websites. As I developed websites though, I realized that no matter how cool the site looked, or what nifty functions it had, I really wasn’t contributing anything worthwhile. It was actually quite depressing for me, thinking that I had learned all of this stuff to help other people deliver their message to the world, yet I didn’t have anything to say.

It was about this time that the aforementioned epiphany struck and I returned to school. My psychology studies have given me that opportunity to contribute meaningful information to the world. The research I am working on has the potential to help people lead better lives. I am quite proud to be a part of it and for taking the tentative first steps in that direction.

The reason I mention all of this is that with four years of study, and especially the last year of research, I better understand how technology can help me and those in my field to more efficiently conduct research, analyze data, and contribute to the body of knowledge avaiable to the mental health practitioners and the public. I think I have made an excellent transition from learning the technology for it’s own sake, to learning how to use technology as a tool for making a lasting contribution.

It seems to me with such a wide variety of terms used for the exact same action there needs to be a single word to describe that action. Market analysts are constantly evaluating the language they use in advertisements, to ensure maximum impact on their target audiences. Despite all the research, there is clearly no consensus for how to tell some to get on the web and read the contents of a website. I would have expected someone to coin a phrase by now that would catch on and everyone would start using, but given the age of the internet, and the myriad new words created and adopted into the lexicon, I suspect that this particular issue may be a problem for years to come.

Historians rely on documents to reconstruct the past. I had one history professor say that historians, “dabble in documents.” The problem that I see is forming involves the volatility of data stored in digital formats. In the past two years I have had to replace four hard drives. I am fairly diligent in keeping backups of all my important data, but with the simultaneous crashing of two hard drives on different computers I ended up losing about three months worth of photos, email, and other documents. Not a huge loss, but on a larger scale the impact on future historians could be catastrophic. Couple that with the trend toward digital photography, email, instant messaging, etc. it’s clear that much of the material historians use to analyze history are becoming recycled electrons. Hard copies are seldom if ever made of these transient means of communication, and without these the jobs of historians and genealogists will be much more difficult.

I am concerned that unless more people become aware of this issue the digital age may be as difficult for future generations to understand as the dark ages are today.