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The line still ringing in my ears from this conversation is Alice's saying that "technology is whatever we aren't yet comfortable using."  And it is echoing strongly with something I'm reading tonight: the work of Mark Hansen, a professor of "literature and the arts of the moving image" @ Duke, who is coming to speak to the Faculty Working Group in American Studies @ Haverford on Thursday evening. In an essay called "Ubiquitous Sensation or the Autonomy of the Peripheral," Hansen draws on a 1991 Scientific American article by Mark Weiser on  "The Computer in the 21st Century" --and takes Alice's statement one step further:

"'Such a  disappearance [of computers into the background] is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they cease to be aware of it. When you look @ a street sign, for example, you absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading .... [W]hen things disappear ... we are freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals.' In line with this reality of human life, the goal of the ubiquitous computer designer can only be to render computers invisible so that attention can be focused on action rather than connection."

It's this last line that I now want to think some more about (and would of course welcome further thinking-with by others!). So much of the current commentary on the effect of computers on our lives has focused on the capacities of social networking--that is, of connecting. But Hansen is suggesting that such connections are only means, only media, only the medium via which we will (and now can, as computers become ubiquitous, and invisible) move on to do new things.