Considering the contents of my bag in light of our thinking about the history of text, I was surprised to note that each of the items I usually carry either produces, or is usually necessary for, the production of text in the modern sense. Similarly, most are connected with the word’s usage in the ancient sense, being woven, or crafted, not of cloth but of transistors, larger boards, and processors. This is true not only of the iPad and phone, but also of the smaller items, each of them is also made up of many components situated in relation to one another with each of those components, in turn, being made up of smaller pieces which are situated even more precisely. I would suggest that it is not a stretch to compare such boards to letters and punctuation on the page.
This connection with text stretches through the use of the devices themselves, and I’ve often thought of it as the devices have replaced more other things in any bag I carry. Ten years ago, or even five, I would have had at least one book and audio book player in the bag but now, there’s no need. Similarly, I had a notepad of some sort, even a few years ago. Again, now that the technology has become more reliable, there is little need for such a thing. In one sense, this increases single points of failure, but, in another, given the quality and price of the technology, those points of failure are highly unlikely to actually cause failures.
This leads me to my needs and, once again, I see that the technology here fulfils many which would have been fulfilled by other, and less computerized, things several years ago. I work in IT but, even if I had been doing the same work ten years ago, I would have probably needed a laptop of some sort, at the very least. I would probably have needed more proprietary technology, as well, if only because the products I use at work were far less standardized in their hardware several years ago. When I worked with adaptive technology, I think my physical bag would have been more of an indicator of what I did on a daily basis, I often carried devices which were specific to that context like braille displays and, before those, hardware speech synthesizers. I would think that even with my current devices, the fact that I work in IT could probably be inferred, but if I had taken photos of my bag even five years ago, it would have been far clearer. This is not to say that the things I do would have changed significantly, I continue to spend much of my time reading and writing just as I did before, but the tools used to read and write have changed and grown fewer.
Again, because the technology I carry is involved in so many of my activities, personal and work reading/writing, remote connections to computers, occasional meetings, and so on, only a look at each device’s storage and history would really show what I was doing for anyone looking at the bag, whether that person looked at it now or in the future. Similarly, the fact that I enjoy reading in English, that my work involves a good deal of both reading and writing, and the fact that I occasionally use audio readings of books can only really be determined by examining the storage of the tools, not the tools themselves.
