the importance of thinking about what a technology can/should/cant/shouldnt do

i really like this article that a 1.0/2.0 (i.e., real life and twitter life) friend of mine, @mountcomp, tweeted this morning.* what i like about it:

1. it talks about 2 cloudy tech tools that i love

2. it talks about how one isn’t the other and how we shouldn’t try to make one into the other’s image

3. that it uses a 3rd awesome tool (instapaper) to talk about the first two awesome tools, dropbox and evernote.

what #2 really points at (IMO) is the importance of investigating strengths/weaknesses of new tools so that we can more effectively use them and understand what they can do for us. to use old school technologies as an example,  i COULD call everyone on the phone that i want to share the same message with, or i could use a copy machine to “post” a msg i want to push out to the world. i guess i COULD just start dialing successive phone number to broadcast my “copy machine” msg, but that would be dumb (and irritating). it’s all about choosing the right tool. golfers don’t use a putter to drive the ball hundreds of yards from the tee box to the hole, but that doesn’t make the putter dumb or useless. it’s the golfer that makes a wise or a dumb choice. a choice that is perfect in one setting, epic fail in another. i love the quote in NMR that ellen shared in the seminar yesterday. it’s so appropriate for NM, and it’s so appropriate in most all aspects of  life (1.0r 2.0!):

“Prometheus is a hero to some and a transgressor to others, and both are right. Fire warms and fire burns.”(p.8)

and cool- here’s someone else who’s talked about this in a previous NMseminar!

*the serendipity of stuff shared in social technology circles always makes me happy. the article that dropped in my lap this morning thanks to twitter led to what looks like a lot of other interesting stuff. yay, interwebs!