Devin Coldewey has a smart essay at Techcrunch pointing out that the tech items we use constantly and depend on for function, the ones that look so beautiful, provide little emotional connection for us because of their uniform and disposable nature. I agree with his assessment of digital culture, where disposal is built into the agreement. Analog technology, like those scratchy LP records that were purchased to not only be played but also to be collected, can hold us in their sway and attach themselves to our hearts and minds. Not so with an iPod. An excerpt:

“It’s a puzzling and complicated relationship we have with technology, as it is personified (for lack of a better term) in our iPhones, laptops, and other gadgets. We hold them and touch them every day, look at them for hours on end, sleep next to them. But how little we care for them!

I know that much of this is because what interests us in our devices is not the device itself, but that to which it is a conduit. Our friends, a map of the world, the whole of human knowledge (if not wisdom) at our fingertips. I don’t value my laptop the way I value my jacket because if I lose the laptop, my friends and Google and Wikipedia will still be there, waiting for me to find another way to get at them. It’s not so surprising, then, that we don’t value this middle-man object much.

And although we share so much of our lives with these devices, they don’t last very long. We’re like serial monogamists, committed until something better comes along, usually after a year or two. Can you really be fond of something you know you plan to replace?

Yet however reasonable it appears, still it disturbs me. It strikes me as wrong that our most powerful and expensive and familiar objects should be the ones we love the least.”