Adopting A New Thing

I have recently acquired a laptop. This very post was written on it. I never have had one of my own, and having observed others using theirs all these years has left me none the wiser as to just how one makes the most of the thing. I have succeeded in squeezing all the functionality out of every cellphone I ever had, doing things with some that predated mainstream adoption with the advent of the smartphone. The laptop is something else though. I'm trying to not just really get the benefits of having a portable computer but to avoid the social pitfalls of same.

When does one use a laptop and not the phone? When does one eschew both and just be a human being the way we used to? I'm still trying to work that stuff out. It's probably unwise to have the laptop with you everywhere, so a judgment must be made on the likelihood of it proving both useful and not awkward. I'm accustomed to bringing everything and the kitchen sink just in case, but that's really not a workable strategy with something like this. As I don't presently drive, everything must be born on my back, so to speak. If I take the laptop with me, it must always be on my person. In a bad situation, it could be stolen or damaged. Bad situations must be avoided.


It occurs to me as well that I don't want to look like a jerk. I'm certainly not against using it in public or just in the presence of friends, but I know how I've felt about people who I've seen using their own laptops. There's something that rankles. When it's an affectation or a deliberate, ostentatious display of prosperity, I certainly don't care for that. Worse is when someone has their whole office on hand and operating in concert with the laptop. Friends who work at coffee shops have seen it so many times. Some "power businessman" is sipping a latte while making big deals from a table in the cafe. He's got the laptop with an external mouse, an actual printer and piles of papers and folders all spread out. I positively do not want that for myself.

It's often like this, I think. As I've noted, technology moves much more quickly than our ability to fully integrate it. There are some very instructive examples in warfare, but the most current examples are in areas like consumer electronics and online social networking. We have the laptop, the smartphone and the tablet computer, and we're madly struggling to figure out where each one leaves off and the next one picks up. We have these very powerful websites but have yet to coalesce around any hard and fast rules about how we use them. It's a very exciting but confused time.