My So Called Digital Life, V2.0 Part 1
An overview of the “life” part of the “digital life”…
Hi there. My name is Ethan Kaplan, 30 years old, Vice President of Technology for Warner Bros Records. I have had this job for four years now, and early on when I moved and settled down in Los Angeles I wrote a post or two about how I manage my life through technology.
Things have changed a bit since then.
The scope of my job has increased, I bought and remodeled a house and eight weeks ago we had a baby. As one could imagine, all of these serve to disrupt the life part of living, and the role of technology with each addition of responsibility – from direct reports to a baby – likewise has had to evolve.
The goal of this series of posts is to share how I’ve interwoven technology tools into the fabric of my daily living, and how those tools serve to help and define my relationship to others and the world. The fact is that if you are reading this you are a geek, and I am a bigger geek than you. Seriously. Technology tools are essential to me from the moment I get up in the morning to the moment I go to sleep.
In order to understand just how important. lets establish a few things about me in terms of “life” before we get to the digital aspects:
- I work and live within a mile of each other.
- I run at least fifteen miles a week
- As part of my job running the technology department, I maintain a rule that no one in my department should ever secretly pine for a faster computer. Me included.
- I like automation.
- My wife is a geek but more in the “transparent technology” way
- Music is a huge part of my life and every aspect of it
- I am biased toward Apple products
- I travel a lot, usually to New York and San Francisco
- I enjoy hacking and programming but do not often get the change to do so anymore
- My background is in conceptual art theory
I think the most fundamental aspect of understanding how I have constructed my digital life however is that I believe and live by the thinking that computers in all forms should augment and enable better living. I think that computers let us be more human than human, and the ultimate goal of any piece of technology should be to become as part of me as my feet.
I like computers because they make the infinite finite, the complex contextualized and reduce chaos down to constituent bits. In terms of how I integrate them into my life, these are the things I look at computers to provide.
Life is infinitely complex and chaotic enough.
…
To be continued: what I am looking at technology to provide…
How do you get from home to work? The cliche would be that you still would go by car (maybe hybrid and all, but still). Can you please prove that cliche wrong?
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A quick bump on the car issue mentioned above – it’s an interesting issue I think, as you haven’t touched on auto-related “digital life” issues that much in the blog.
Do you use the car much, ie going to work and back every day, or just on weekends? How is it incorporated in the digital life?
on the car front – I drive a total of 1 to 2 miles a day usually, and then more when I go to the airport, etc. The car doesn’t factor in as much.
I have a BMW 328i, nav system and iPod dock inside and bluetooth in it. Our other car is a Mercedes ML350 which is the “kid” car (car seat, etc) and my wife drives it, much more than I do mine.