Another Technological Advance

I looked up the other day from my BlackBerry. Or was it the iPhone? I can’t recall which.

I was crossing the street, probably oblivious to oncoming traffic. I was rushing back to my office. There I looked forward to opening up a .pdf file, a document that was sent in a format compatible with my Acrobat Reader program. One of our lawyers was waiting for me to review the document and make comments.

I planned to open the document on my desktop. I was thinking that if it were too long to read I might copy it to my laptop and bring it home to review that night sitting at home on the couch. While my son watched Law & Order I could read the draft carefully. If the comments were too many, I might ask my lawyer to send it to me in a Word format. That way I could mark it up on the screen and return it to him in the morning.

As I crossed the street, I passed a bus shelter on the side of the road. Sitting on the bench was a man waiting for the bus. Something caught my attention. I know how fast these new technological innovations come and go. But I was so struck by this new breakthrough that I wanted to hasten to bring it to your attention.

The man on the bench held in his hands a large object. Maybe a foot and a half across, a couple feet long, it seemed to be made of linen, or cotton, or perhaps a synthetic material. All I could tell was that it did not hold its shape for very long. It seemed to flap in the breeze, even crinkle from time to time like crushed velvet, shadows coming and going across its surface.

I paused on the curb to see what I could learn about this new device. I watched the man stare at it intently, holding the object in front of him and focusing his eyes on it as if he were reading some kind of huge cell phone. After a moment, he reached his hand across and unfurled the object to twice its width, then snapped it backwards so that it was half the size again. He looked at it even more closely and as the bus pulled up to the shelter. Suddenly, I saw him quickly fold it so that its size was the size of an old-fashioned book and tuck it under his arm as he climbed the steps.

How novel, I thought. A new technology, one which I think I have heard about but not yet seen. I believe it is being called a newspaper, an interesting cross between a PDA (personal digital assistant) and a Kindle (Amazon’s new electronic book gizmo). Larger than either of these, the so-called newspaper seems to allow one to scan a number of stories at once. Instead of seeing only one story in a space about the half the size of a pack of cigarettes, the reader can actually scan dozens of stories and pictures as well. Indeed, the pictures are instantaneously accessible and do not require a long time to upload.

As I sit here at my desk in front of my flat screen, I am truly envious of that gentleman on the bench. I’m sure that this new technology must be frightfully expensive, but I look forward to the time when its price may drop to, say, $200 or less so that I might experiment with it.

Who knows if this new technology will survive the onset of competitors. It may be gone in a few months. If so it may go the way of floppy disks and fax machines. Sort of the way Twitter seems to be going. Today’s hot new gadget. Tomorrow’s quaint techy memory.

Or then again, the newspaper may catch on. And my friend on the bench will have been a pioneer. And I will tell my grandchildren about when I spotted the first newspaper, in a bus shelter, while looking up from my BlackBerry.

Or was it the iPhone?