Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're reviving an old friend.
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Earlier this year, just before all the lockdowns and quarantines started, I bought an Amazon Echo Dot. It sits here next to my computer and functions mainly as a music player but occasionally gets used to set alarms and reminders and generally function as a pricey but interesting bit of office kit. But, on the other side of the computer, newly cleaned up and restored, sits my old pal Chumby. They feel, rightly, I suspect, like two ends on a timeline. And, honestly, I'm fascinated by the way my kid interacts with them.
I mean, it’s not exactly the one I have, but it’s close enough. Photo by Andres Urena on Unsplash.
Okay, let's back up. In case you're not familiar with either device, here's a quick rundown:
The Echo Dot is a small, round, cloth-covered speaker (mine is the cheaper, plugged in version rather than the completely wireless one) powered by Amazon's digital assistant, Alexa, who can listen for specifically worded commands and then respond appropriately. In other words, if you ask a question like "How's the weather today?" she (not it) will tell you the forecast for your area, and if you tell her to play a song, well, she will. There are a lot of pros and cons and privacy concerns and so on and so forth but, for me, I enjoy the hands-free functionality and I like being able to ask basic information-seeking questions without stopping whatever it is I'm doing.
Chumby, on the other hand, can be thought of as Alexa's great-great-grandfather. Back in the early 2000s, Chumby Industries put out a small computer also called Chumby, designed to give people information at a glance through helpful, always-on apps and tools. They gave Chumby a variety of soft exteriors in muted colors and packaged the computers with soft rubber-eraser mascots and toys all the better to make Chumby an office pal rather than merely another piece of gear.
Chumby downloading an app. Photo by Andreas Pizsa.
It worked. I kept my Chumby on permanent display on my desk, cycling through a double-handful of apps ranging from a Star Trek: The Next Generation inspired clock face to a slideshow of my own photos pulled from my Flickr feed. But. Eventually the company ran out of money and folded. Fans eventually pooled enough money together to keep Chumby going as an independent service funded through subscriptions. However, in the time between these two events, one company folding and one being founded, my Chumby ended up in my dead-tech box, only occasionally to be withdrawn and remembered fondly.
Until this past weekend, when my daughter found my dead-tech box and recognized the logo on the canvas bag Chumby had arrived in. (I had long since given her the toys that came with Chumby, which is why she was able to recognize the logo.) At her urging, I got Chumby out of the box, updated the software, and signed up for a subscription. Meanwhile, my daughter has learned how to navigate the menus on the touch-screen to play music, look at photos, change the clock face, and view the weather and calendar apps.
I mentioned above that Chumby could be thought of as Alexa's (and the Echo Dot's great-great-grandfather. Chumby debuted as part of the "ambient devices" fad that was going to be the next big thing, circa 2002. The idea behind these ambient devices was that they would be always-on and, more importantly, completely unobtrusive. They would give you key information at a glance without you needing to search or otherwise shift your focus away from whatever it was you were doing. The prime example was a device called the Ambient Orb. It could be configured to show the a single piece of information via its color. In other words, you could glance at it and see whether the market was up or down for the day or how bad traffic would be on the drive home.
Somewhere between then and now the ambient half of ambient devices got lost and we ended up with the current explosion of smart devices - devices that can show a lot of different information but must be interacted with in some way in order for it to be shown. And, to be fair, so does Chumby. It was never quite as ambient as it wanted to be and the makers knew that. But they were selling the illusion of Chumby as a desk-top pal. By making it cute and fun-looking, they were showing us a world where the line between functional tool and cuddly toy could be blurred out if not wholly eradicated.
I was reminded of that when I saw my daughter playing with Chumby. She likes talking to Alexa and getting her to play music or tell us about the weather, but she couldn't stop touching Chumby even though it's 15 years old, the touchscreen is fiddly, and the speaker quality is far below that of the Echo Dot. She just thought it was cute. These days, another Amazon product, the Echo Show is a lot like Chumby on steroids. It has a screen and channels and even comes with Alexa. But it's not very cute. It's pleasant, well-designed, yes, but not cute.
I don't know that there needs to be a cute Echo Dot, and Bob knows there are already hundreds of other cute gadgets out there, but Chumby managed to find that fine line between tool and toy that I wish other companies would put a little bit more effort into searching for. In the meantime, I'm just glad that Chumby is back on my desk, passively, unobtrusively showing the time and the occasional photo.
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Stay safe, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel