Jonathan Margolis reports in the Financial Times:
The “pinch-to-zoom” tablet gesture, for example (more accurately unpinch to zoom), did not exist before the iPad came out in 2010.Already our brains have internalised it, and there is a generation growing up who have never not known it. A YouTube video of children who believe magazines are broken iPads has had nearly 5m views.
I was shaving one Saturday morning with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Danny Baker Show playing in the background. It is a reflection of Mr Baker’s infectious hilarity that he attracts radio’s funniest callers.
The programme’s theme was something like: “Mistakes that can never be corrected.” A guy phoned in to tell how, in the days of VHS, he accidentally recorded Match of the Day over a tape of his daughter’s wedding.
I was only half listening but thought: “That’s not a problem. All he has to do is press ‘control’ and ‘Z’.”
Control Z is my secret sauce. I am amazed how few people know it. It works on any PC keyboard in Microsoft Word and other programs, and reverses mistakes. Clumsily deleted a paragraph? Control Z and it magically reappears.
I have reincarnated pages of writing that way — you can carry on control Z-ing, reversing action after action, if the mistake you made was a few minutes ago.
In a previous column I touched on technology habits that seem to have subtly altered our internal programming. I mentioned the occasional desire to turn down loud people in restaurants with an imaginary remote, or touch a nonexistent hyperlink in a printed magazine in the hope that it will, as on an iPad, take me to a different page.
Since articulating this, I have been making notes on my own and others’ crossover technology habits that have leaked into the wrong sphere of activity.
These quirks stem from being of the generation that has moved from analogue rather than having been born digital. If I were cleverer, I would think up one of those annoying, modish words such as “trope” or “meme” to describe my micro-phenomenon.
Here is my list:
• You still make notes by hand in meetings. After a couple of pages of scribbling, you become uneasy about not having saved your work to make sure the writing, um, stays on the page.
• Faced with a multi-page printed document, you are impatient to get to the bit that concerns you. You instinctively dive to the search box. Where is that darned search box?
• The same lengthy document. You try to scroll down … before realising you cannot scroll down stapled sheets of paper.
• You’re driving a car without satnav. Maybe it’s rented, maybe you forgot to bring your TomTom, or maybe you didn’t bother because you know the way. You get a frisson of irritation with the silence. “Why are you not saying anything?” The fact that cars can’t talk has momentarily escaped you.
• There’s a photo in a book or newspaper and you want to zoom in to see a part of it. Your hand moves towards the page to do that thumb and forefinger expanding action before you realise it’s not a tablet.
• You’ve lost your wallet somewhere in the house. Hold on, you think, I’ll call it and hear where the ring is coming from. Oops, no you won’t. It’s not a phone.
• A more extreme case of wallet loss. You’re so distracted that you think for a fraction of a second of googling to find where you left it. Or hitting Control F to find it.
• Spectacle wearers only. You’re stumbling around in the morning looking for your glasses. You put them on. Aha, you think. Now we are in HD.
Technology has a habit of moving on. The “pinch-to-zoom” tablet gesture, for example (more accurately unpinch to zoom), did not exist before the iPad came out in 2010.
Already our brains have internalised it, and there is a generation growing up who have never not known it. A YouTube video of children who believe magazines are broken iPads has had nearly 5m views.
Yes, a visual and auditory version of the same blurring of the lines between what’s real and imagined.”
So what will be the pinch-to-zoom gestures of the near future, the habits we will be trying to carry into everyday life — but with the wrong technology — in, say, 2036?
If I may stick my neck out, I will propose a few.
• You hear someone speaking in a foreign language and become irritated that you cannot understand them because you don’t have your translating earbuds in. The idea that your native ears (legacy ears, for techies) cannot translate languages will, for a second or two, be really annoying.
• You forget to wear your connected glasses or put in your internet contacts (the descendants of today’s joked-about Google Glass internet spectacles) and experience a flash of fury at, say, a conference, when your unaided eyes do not recognise colleagues’ faces and fail to discreetly brief you on who they are.
• You are so accustomed to using your hands to make air gestures, to control the TV and other devices, that you carry it over into everyday life. At least once a year, when listening to someone droning on at a meeting, you absentmindedly make the air gesture for fast forward. They will continue being boring. Unless they see the gesture, perhaps. Which may be a different kind of crossover error.
Let me think about that for a decade or two.
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