On Tiptoe
Woody and Buzz do not seem to age. Children, unfortunately for them, do. Their newest object of fascination is Lily-pad, a tablet-like toy that offers children something Woody never could: an endless world at their fingertips. The old toys watch from the margins as their place in a child’s life begins to shrink. I expected this to make me think about technology. Instead, I thought about condensed milk.
When I was a child, a can of condensed milk lived somewhere toward the back of our refrigerator. My parents had drizzled it over pat-bing-su (팥빙수) the night before, and I had discovered that something so ordinary-looking could be almost absurdly sweet. The next day, I wanted more. The problem was that I was too short. I had to drag over a chair, climb onto it, and rise onto my toes just to see the can. Sometimes my parents gave me a little. Sometimes I conducted the operation without their knowledge. I never got very much, which may have been part of what made it so good.
Much of childhood worked this way. The upper cabinets in our kitchen contained things I could not see. Toys disappeared into boxes in my parents’ room or the garage and stayed there long enough to become interesting again. Friends were not permanently reachable. I had to call their house, wait for a parent to answer, and nervously ask if so-and-so could come to the phone. If no one picked up, that was sometimes the end of it. Questions could linger, too. Without a convenient way to settle them, some of my childhood theories about the world survived much longer than they deserved to. It was inefficient, certainly. But there was a peculiar excitement in not knowing - in looking, waiting, guessing, and occasionally finding something I had not set out to find.
I live almost entirely in the opposite world now. A text locates a friend. A question that once might have lingered for years disappears in seconds. At work, I can ask a machine to investigate one problem while another agent works on something else, and for a moment I have the leverage of someone managing a small, tireless team. I like this world. I make my living partly because it exists. There is something genuinely thrilling about having more of the world within reach. I have no desire to preserve ignorance merely for the romance of eventually overcoming it.
Still, I sometimes catch myself asking the machine before I have properly had the question. I encounter a problem and reach for an answer before I have had time to be puzzled by it. A screen recommends what to read before I know what I was looking for, and shows me things to want before I have had the pleasure of wanting them on my own. The world available to me has grown almost unimaginably wide. But the path between curiosity and its satisfaction has become very short. I can go farther than the child on that kitchen chair could have imagined, and rarely have to get lost along the way. This is mostly progress. I just do not want efficiency to make me forget how much I once enjoyed wandering.
Perhaps that is what I saw in Woody and Buzz. I remember a world in which I had to stand on tiptoe for a taste of something sweet, and I now work in one where machines can begin answering before I have finished asking. I want the machines. I want the reach they give me, and I am curious about how much farther they will take us. What I would rather not surrender is the child who still wants to pull open a box simply because he does not remember what is inside. So every once in a while, I want to leave a question unanswered for another minute. To look around before I search. To wonder before I ask. And, when I can, to wander back into the garage without knowing what I am looking for - still hoping to be surprised by what I find.
