On Thursday evening it struck, the disaster: I dropped my iBook. And the screen went dead.
It has happened before, but it’s still a frightening experience. I’ve been carrying this thing around pretty much every day for the past three years or so, and it has become more than just a pretty white plastic blobject: it’s an external brain, a repository of ideas, a memory aid, a Turing machine augmenting the grey mush between my ears. So damaging it, I felt something very much akin to physical pain. Cognitive scientists speak of the embodied mind: the standard example of this is claiming that Tetris players use the physical act of rotating blocks to compute a solution to the problem or that notebooks, computer address books, calendars, PDAs and the like are repositories of our memory in a very real sense. Make of that what you will, but seeing my little white shiny friend go dark felt like a crack appeared in my own skull.
My sanity might have been seriously damaged had it not been for the fact that I had previously purchased a low-end desktop that was about to be thrown away from our department for £25: I had vague ideas about doing some hacking turning it into a music server, but actually I just let it gather dust in a corner. But since I found myself suddenly and abruptly computer-less, I decided to install Linux on it and see if I could come up with at least some sort of facsimile of my usual OS X work environment. This proved to be pretty easy, since most of the tools I use are open-source Unixy things anyway. The distribution I chose was Ubuntu, and I have to say that I was very impressed — Linux distributions have obviously come a long way since I last used Red Hat. Ubuntu installed very quickly without any problems whatsoever, and before long I had LaTeX and Emacs running as well, installed via Ubuntu’s excellent package management system, Synaptic. The overall feeling of the system (on a low-end Pentium) is quite snappy, the Gnome-based desktop is clean and it comes bundled with a nice set of packages, including OpenOffice 2.0. Emacs, in particular, is in its natural environment here, and behaves better than its Carbon cousin under Tiger.
There are two things that this little experience made me think about. First, at the moment I’m running a completely free operating system on a computer that cost me almost nothing, and can do pretty much everything else that my laptop can do. Of course, I can’t carry it around and the eye-candy quotient is much lower, but hey, it works! It makes me think about projects like the MIT $100 laptop project that (in spite of Nicholas Negroponte’s unfortunate bumblings in front of Kofi Annan and the rest of the world) and how computing could be made available to all the potential Einsteins and Ramanujans in the Third World.
Second, If one takes embodied cognition seriously, computers suddenly become really important. For computers as extensions of the mind are not limited to one physical purpose or configuration. They can create pseudo-physical spaces where text and ideas can be moved around and visualised and exchanged. They can be reprogrammed for each different function, whether as a memory device, spatial computing tool or (as is often the case) an entertainment device. It also makes me wonder that we’re not necessarily using our computers in the right ways. Perhaps computers should be made more physical, like LeapFrog’s pentop that seems to be all the rage this Christmas. It’s a brilliant idea: you can draw a calculator on paper and it works! Or write out a word and have a synthesised voice translate it into Spanish for you. This is the kind of merging of the physical and the imaginary that is happening all the time around us, faster and faster. With things like specks on the drawing board (about which I’ll hopefully say more later), computers are at the point where they can break out of the big boring white boxes like the one humming on my desk and go out into the world where they can play with us and become a part of us, embody our dreams and desires and ideas.
(But I still want my iBook back. I feel like I’ve been lobotomised. I even tried the tried-and-true technique, suggested by a surprising number of online forums, of waving a wand over the machine and repeating the mantra “Apple is God. Apple is God”, but it didn’t resurrect my baby. I may have to try lightning and Tesla coils next, or simply give money to the Apple Store. Sigh.)