@hellomiakoda ‘s thread about visual imagination reminded me of something I realized yesterday. I was talking to my wife about taking things apart as a kid, to see what’s inside and how I hate electronics as a field of technology. I don’t hate the devices and their functionality. I hate the way electronics work.
Let me elaborate.
As a child, I was very interested in how devices worked and liked to open things up, take them apart and put them back together. With mechanical devices, this has always been easy for me because I can see how the parts move and interact with each other, thus I can see their function and make sense of the whole thing easily. It is fixable if something isn’t destroyed but only misaligned for example, and I can readily identify what can’t be fixed without a new part.
Then one day, I opened up my first small fm radio. It was the biggest disappointment of my life up to that point. There were no moving parts with discernible functions. Nothing made sense because I couldn’t watch how they worked. I could see the components but they were completely opaque to me as to what their individual and collective functions were.
I remember feeling so utterly cheated. The world had invented something that I couldn’t figure out, by myself, as a six year old, and therefore I hated it.
I still find electronics boring to the extreme, even though I learned enough about the field to understand how they work. No visibly moving parts (electrons don’t count), nothing to look at, nothing to keep my interest going.
