This was kind of cool. It's a 7 minute re-enactment of a court deposition, wherein
The specific deposition, which dates back to 2010, involved the
Recorders' Office refusing to hand out electronic documents, but instead
telling people who wanted copies of records that they had to pay for
them to be printed/photocopied at $2 per page.
Apparently the Recorders' Office lost the case.
I really, really enjoy the idea of dramatic re-enactments of transcripts. I don't even care which transcripts. I just want to get my hands on some.
The other aspect that I enjoy about this, is thinking about that period of time wherein almost no one knew what a photocopier was to it becoming common place. This also came up today when an employee at OMAFRA, who is 50, recalled a time when a deputy minister refused to use e-mail, so no one else in the office did, and then eventually he sent out one mass e-mail, and it was a catalyst for regular electronic communication.
People still frequently hand-wrote messages and documents, or typed them on a type-writer, or typed them on a computer (which leading up to the e-mail became common place, but people only used them for specialised purposes) and then printed them out. The Internet and networked communication was still largely foreign. It makes sense. There had to be a before and an after. It's just impressive to consider. E-mail seems so fundamental to me.
I think I'm a bit disappointed by how much comes between me and core functions like e-mail, like text documents. Images, pretty window frames, fancy desktops, they're all very distracting. Blogger's compose window is nicer than a lot of editors, but it's still distracting. I still see the tab bar. I suppose I would enjoy maximal focus. That can be a side-project for me, I guess.
I was speaking with my friend Peter about the rate of change of technology, futurism, transhumanism, the singularity, etc. last night. The length of time a technology can rise up before being superseded by something better keeps getting shorter. I feel like the life as lived today will be closer to life as it was lived five generations ago than it will be to life lived five or even three generations from now. It's weird to think about how integral my mobile phone is to my daily life when even five years ago I was phoneless and adamantly against owning one. (My objections were their lousy design, inadequate functionality, and abusing service plans, all of which have been addressed thanks to smart phones and WIND Mobile.)
I really cherish e-mail as a technology. I'm sad when people communicate predominantly in a closed silo like Facebook, whose messaging platform is borders on unusable and fails to benefit from over 30 years of electronic messaging evolution.
Ah well.
