No school like old school?

From my limited observation, the USB drive has sort of kicked off a revival of [cough] "old school" [cough] sneaker-netting. Nothing wrong with that, certainly: There's still a lot of variability in network speed, even without the 8000-lb gorilla ISPs throttling bandwidth to punish the many for the sins of the few--or at least using the DMCA as a fig-leaf for capping their costs.

In a similar vein, dual monitors and document annotation, even in tandem, have failed to produce and efficient replacement for marking up paper printouts for editing, especially when the printouts can be at least 11 x 17 inches in size). I don't think that it's just me being, err, "retro," either. Granted, in many respects, we've been trained by computers (or, more aptly, their creators) to do things "their" way. And even to think in their terms. (Case in point: One of my co-workers recently asked whether we'd finished discussing a meeting item by asking, quote, "So, can we hit the 'X' on this one?") But some activities are still too cumbersome in their current digital-friendly form. Others tend to bring out our worst tendencies, running the gamut of lax spelling (think texting) to saying things via the internet that we wouldn't say in person.

New does not equal better, particularly when the "new" more or less amounts to a solution looking for a problem. That's a truism in every other aspect of life, but we somehow have a tendency to lose that wisdom when a glittering new technology bats its eyelashes at us. Double that when the Joneses already have one.