Reflection on my digital life triggered by iTune’s 5-year anniversary

06May08

This Adaptive Path article on iTune’s 5th year anniversary made me realize how fast time travels in the technology world. Has it really only been 5 years? That seems crazy to me. But when I think back about my adaption to technologies, I realized I’ve only embraced most of them in the past few years. I’ve never been an early-adapter to high-tech gadgets or social network sites (maybe because I grew up as a kid who played in mud all day, not watching TV or playing video games). In fact, I’ve never really used a computer until I was in high school and even then, I only did the computer basic 101 - emails and web browsing on my family desktop. Then when I started working at a sound lab at Georgia Tech, I started using Macs and I think I got my first laptop (a hand-me-down) in the last year of my college. It wasn’t until I went to grad school and switched to MacBook that I really started to embrace digital life. I’m not a die-hard Mac person but that purchase and my interest in the field of HCI was a pivotal point in my transition to streamlining data using digital and web medium. After that, the list of web-based tools and networks I use seem to get longer daily….

It’s good to remember that this kind of mental model is relatively new when designing any interfaces. I’m constantly reminded when I do user research and find out the wide range of demographics that system should support.

I feel like I was at such a good time to study and make HCI my career choice. It surprised a lot of people when I chose to study computer-related field because of my lack of interest in anything high-tech, and I’m still pretty much unchanged (I still have no TV). But the environment I got exposed at CMU and the amount of innovations I continue to see around me are always inspiring. There is just so much potential in our capacity to improve the quality of life.

You might adapt to new technologies much faster than me or you might be making conscious effort to stay away from digital media. I wonder with so many applications and tools out there, how people decide to adapt some and not others. Care to share your thoughts?