Since I do most of my work on a computer, I must focus on the prosaic task of putting one word after another, rather than keeping up with the latest and greatest technological trends.
Thus I have avoided Facebook, tweeting, texting, Skype, voice-recognition, e-book readers, smartphones, GPS gear, netbooks, any product starting with “i” followed by a one-syllable word starting with “P,” all software produced by Microsoft, and a host of other vexations and annoyances that would make me less productive.
There’s an easy way to determine whether some software is worth the trouble. If it’s called an “app,” then it’s something I can ignore since it likely won’t run on my GNU/Linux system.
Further, the use of “app” instead of “application” or “program” annoys me. It seems lazy, as though it was just too much work to utter another syllable or two.
Granted, our language tends to shorten locutions. The “taxi” or “cab” is an abridgment of “taxicab” which is in turn a compression of “taximeter cab” — the taximeter is the device that reckons distances and fares.
But there’s a long and honorable tradition of carping about truncation. Three centuries ago, the great English satirist Jonathan Swift bemoaned the use of “mob” as opposed to the “mobile vulgus” (fickle crowd) that he preferred. He and essayist Joseph Addison also complained about “pozz” for “positively” and “rep” for “reputation.”
The latter two seem to have faded, or else we might have read that “Newt Gingrich’s philandering rep pozz won’t help him win the Republican nomination.”
Back to modern technology. “App” just sounds frivolous. The weirder modern computing buzzword is the “cloud.”
As I understand it, the “cloud” is where you can store your data and apps, and it’s accessible from just about anywhere with just about any device. That is, you can store pictures on your desktop computer, send them to the cloud, then access them from Capetown or Vladivostok with your smart phone or iPad.
While that doubtless appeals to people who travel a lot more than I do, it also makes me wonder why anyone would trust anything that matters to something called the “cloud.”
Think about clouds. They’re evanescent as they materialize then disappear, so there’s nothing permanent about them. They change shapes and density constantly, and drift in and out of sight. Often they don’t show up when we need them, as during a drought, and they do appear when we don’t want them, dropping hail and rain to ruin a camping trip or ballgame.
To go on about clouds would risk plagiarizing the song “Both Sides Now” written by Joni Mitchell and made popular by Judy Collins.
The point is that if you’re thinking of some secure and stable accessible storage system, a “cloud” is not what comes to mind. Prudential Insurance does not use a cloud in its logo; it uses the Rock of Gibraltar. The Mormon Church does not store its genealogical records in a cloud, but deep inside Utah’s Granite Mountain. Many American corporations store their records, not in a cloud, but deep underground in an old salt mine in Kansas.
But given the vagaries of data transmission and storage, and how computer systems and communication often do not perform as advertised, maybe “cloud” is appropriate. After all, the term “cloud,” with all its transient and temporary implications, could be considered a fair warning as to how much you should rely on it.
Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
