This is kind of incongruous, coming as it does on the heels of yesterday’s remark that I really don’t like living here in the future, but I was somewhat excited this morning to have my first in-the-wild encounter with one of those Kindle electronic-book gadgets everybody’s been talking about. It was in the hands of a well-dressed older woman sitting a few rows ahead of me on the train.
And why, you may be asking, would a self-confessed semi-Luddite late-adopter like myself be thrilled to glimpse a device that signifies yet another step away from my precious Way Things Used to Be? Well, partly it was just the novelty of actually seeing an object that I’ve heard so much about but which has been, up until now, only an abstraction. That whole experience of “oh, there’s one of those things!” That’s always fun. But what really pushed my buttons was a fleeting sense that I’d somehow stumbled into a Star Trek episode. Seriously. Even though I’ve seen plenty of photos of the Kindle (obviously, since I identified it easily enough; I even recognized it as a Kindle 2 instead of the earlier model), I’ll be damned if my first thought wasn’t, “Hey, that woman is looking at one of those thingies Picard was always using on Next Gen!” I’ve been saying for years that the world seems to be inevitably becoming more like Star Trek; here we have another piece of evidence in support of that theory.
So, to review, I don’t like living in the future because I’m a nostalgic bastard who prefers the past, but I was excited to see a futuristic device because it resembled a prop seen on a 20-year-old television show that was set… in the future.
Yeah, I’m confused, too. Welcome inside my head.
