This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and
readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – fishing, basket weaving,
rugby – whatever.
This time it is my friend Josh Greenbaum with an contrarian, anti-technology POV. Josh, of course, is not a tech Luddite in his day job - he has been covering the enterprise software market longer than anyone else I know.
But when it comes to his hobbies....
"Reflecting on how technology has changed or enhanced my hobbies has been an interesting exercise – first, as my children are now doing things like sleeping through the night and running off to playdates, I’m beginning to enjoy hobbying again after a five year hiatus. The second reason this is so interesting is that I have taken a solemn vow never to take leisure time for granted again, and having taken that vow, I look at my time off and my hobbies with a new sense of their value and meaning in my life.The third realization is that my hobbies are not only extremely tech-free, but are studiously, almost religiously so.
With one notable exception. So let’s start with that. Music is a real passion for me: if I had to do it all over again I would have been a (most likely) starving musician and composer. One of the most notable changes to my relationship with music came with my first Ipod: I suddenly had access to my music in the car, on an airplane (especially once I got my noise-canceling headphones), and even at home in a way that was simpler, more convenient, and more compact than I had ever imagined. This love affair is about to get juiced with the imminent arrival of 30 gigs of music, all of which a friend digitized from our collections of vinyl records. (Yep, I hung on to all the vinyl all these years, and am thrilled that I did.) It just doesn’t get better than this.
But other than music listening, I have an almost anti-technology bend to my other hobbies. I do play a 12-year old electronic keyboard, having decided that headphones are an amazing way to keep anyone else from hearing all the mistakes I’m making as I’m making music. But I’ve never hooked up a computer to the midi interface of my keyboard, never used ProTools or any other composition software, never done more than recorded my songs on tape (though, now that I’m back into this hobby, I may actually start recording using my Ipod).
I think this luddite position dates from my 20s, when I was a much more avid musician and a much harder-working programmer who often spent 10+ hours a day in front of a computer. With that much screen time in my day job, I just couldn’t get excited about spending even more screen time in pursuit of post-work happiness. It just seemed like adding tech to the mix (pun intended) would make it more work than play. At the time, I had a lovely Yamaha acoustic upright, and the analog experience of playing real keys and hearing real strings resonate was all I needed.
Music is definitely as close as I get to technology in my hobbies. My others are biking (no speedometer), hiking (no GPS), backpacking and camping (no satellite phone), discussing politics and society (no tweeting), doing the NYT crossword puzzle (paper and pen), reading newspapers and novels (paper, no Kindle), and generally trying to be outside and away from technology as much as possible. (I probably should add at this juncture that we don’t have cable TV, but you may have figured that out by now.) I used to say, pre-kids, that vacation could only start once we had arrived at a location where all the bars were gone from the cell phone. No more, but it’s still the overriding definition of leisure for me.
That separation of technology and leisure has sort of become thematic in my life, and may be why I don’t jump on new trends like Twitter as quickly as others: I’m not interested in new techy toys, I have as many toys as I need. But as soon as it becomes a genuine business tool, I’ll get on board. Until then, I’d rather take a hike."
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