Have We Passed the High-Water Mark of Seamless Technology?

Have we passed the high point of technology being seamless and easy to use? I recently had to give a presentation to faculty that included showing a few slides, and I assumed I could just bring my MacBook Pro, with its HDMI port, and plug it into the projector that was in the conference room on my campus where the meeting was taking place.

It was not meant to be. Despite having the right cables, my computer would not sync to the projector. That led to the search for other options. Which then led us into dongle hell. Maybe we should try the VGA adapter also available in the room. But of course my newer-model Mac had USB-C and not the older standard Mac connector that is still prevalent, at least among the dongles.

We finally got it all to work, although not without a lot of wasted time. The episode also got me thinking and wondering if we have passed with high-water mark of technology working seamlessly. Are those golden days overs?

I used to feel like an old-timer when I would reminisce about how technology used to be so awful in the late 20th century. I am sure I got snickers from the younger crowd when I bemoaned the old days of having to connect to my email over telephone modems, and trying to figure out the right number of commas in the ATDT command set of telephone modems to time when the lines would ask for things like long-distance codes to be entered. I also remember the days of bringing overhead transparencies of presentations just in case my computer would not sync with the archaic projectors. I recall the days before USB drives when transferring files between computers was sometimes impossible, especially with the disappearance of floppy disks (and presentation file sizes exceeding their capacity).

I believe that the golden days peaked shortly after the start of the 21st century. I would marvel that computers always now seemed to connect to and sync to projectors. First with wired Ethernet and then with the emergence of wifi, we were no longer at the mercy of telephone modems and noisy phone lines (or needing to find Internet cafes). We could connect to our email and institutional servers without make long-distance phone calls. We could even talk on the phone from almost anywhere via Skype.

But now we seem to be regressing. Newer projectors have more resolution, but don’t always work with older computers. Dongle hell is worst for the Mac, but the PC world is not immune. We have multiple connector types for projects, and different types of USB. An additional wrinkle is the need for encryption, and we can move files that pose very small risk (e.g., Powerpoint presentations) easily from where we create them to where we need to present them.

Technology still is marvelous when it works seamlessly. Hopefully the proliferation of cables, connectors, and security protocols will not make the golden era a distant memory