Working with your hands (or fingertips)
Post-graduation, I wanted to either start an internet business, advocate green technology in urban planning, or go to culinary school.
Matthew Crawford made the case that no matter what I do, there should be a sense of pride in my work, that I should act with integrity in my daily musings, and that I should experience the world (and thus my work) with hands-on experiences. Crawford is right: Google Maps cannot recreate the experience of hiking in the Grand Tetons, Facebook cannot replace a face-to-face conversation, and the Food Network cannot come close to the value of tasting my mother’s pot roast, which has far more history and value than “just a recipe.” The only way to learn is via live experiences, “to do” rather than rely on remote experiences, yet remote experiences offer us perspective on a multitude of things that we simply cannot get if one were to experience everything “en vivo.”
This is part of my anxiety. I love to experience the world and be in the moment with whatever I’m doing, yet I feel there is so much to learn. Technology makes us so interconnected and provides such an abundance of information that it is easy to get lost in the fact that we are human and need experiences.
Working in the tech space presumably eliminates the possibility for me to work with my hands, and discover the world in a physical sense. I find value in the process of working and thinking, and to make the web a more personal, live experience.
The web—and technology—offers individuals impersonal lines of communication and discovery. It is evolving into interpersonal experiences, however. Nothing on the web can truly recreate a face-to-face conversation or a home-cooked meal, but it can get close. Some websites already accomplish a more personal experience: television is a one-way channel of communication, and youtube provides a means of conversation. Amazon aggregates products into its ‘aisles’ and gives you a shopping cart to dump into. Amazon’s process is not nearly as thought-provoking as walking through a bookstore, yet it is more efficient from a time and money standpoint and thus it ‘wins.’ The question becomes how do you take what Amazon does—aggregates products—and bring back the spontaneity, conversation, and the human touch in shopping, or anything for that matter?
