This entry has been sitting mostly-done in my drafts for a couple days now, but amusingly enough, “anachronism” popped up as today’s Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. I think someone’s trying to tell me to get off my keister and finish this up ;)
You will often hear people say things like “I should’ve been born in the sixties,” or the middle ages, or one of various other eras in history. It’s not uncommon for people to feel like living anachronisms. But I can’t be the only one who feels like they might have been born too early. I find myself genuinely baffled sometimes that technology hasn’t yet seemed to have caught up with where my brain tells me it’s supposed to be.
The particular instance that prompted this entry was while reading “What the Hashtag?” an entry by Meghan Wilker on Geek Girls Guide (ironically, my sense of time is stuck in the future, and my general online reading is a couple months behind); specifically the section subtitled “What does each hashtag mean?” where she introduces the readers to What the Hashtag, a “user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.” She says, “…this approach of asking the public what [hashtags] each mean is the only way it can be realistically managed.”
And immediately, my brain says, “Why isn’t there a program handling that? You know, one that processes each instance of a hashtag and understands them logically and linguistically, and outputs the gist of each, as well as divergent/aberrant meanings based on cases of irregular usage?”
Yeah.
Then I think about it with my “Now Brain,” and I assume (without any personal knowledge of AI programming, of course) that it’s probably because that sort of program would require huge physical and intellectual/programming resources and likely lots of funding. But even Now Brain thinks this technology has to be out there somewhere, maybe in a research lab or something. Then Future Brain chimes in again. No no, this kind of thing should be so ubiquitous, people don’t even think about it anymore. Where the heck is this technology?!
This is not the first thing Future Brain and Now Brain have disagreed about, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Generally, it has something to do with technology that Future Brain says should be so pervasive as to be trivial, invisible…and isn’t, (and Now Brain grumbles about how this disparity inevitably impacts my bank account because things are expensive when they aren’t commonplace). And this is more than just a thought that crosses my mind occassionally. It’s an odd sensation that I feel at once in both my gut and my head, like my senses are telling me the wrong things. Very weird. Usually that part of it only lasts a moment, and then it turns into something almost completely intellectual.
Do you ever get this feeling? Like you’re out of place in time? Share in the comments! You are not alone! ;)