“The elderly use canes, the youth use phones.”

There’s lots of talk about how technology is forcing people into constant contact, but sometimes this can mean lack of contact with others in the physical world. You know, the place where there is stuff like water, beds, Cheerios, ferns, handicapped parking spaces…

In the Boston Globe, Charlotte Steinway, one of the authors of the excellent anthology RED, wrote this interesting (and kind of frightening) piece about how young people are using technology to shield themselves from social interaction.

I was getting the cold backpacked shoulder largely because everyone was on their iPod or cellphone, or at least pretending to be. The elderly use canes, the youth use phones. What horrified me the most was that by the end of September, I was right there with them, pretending I didn’t recognize the kid whose Facebook page told me he too likes TV on the Radio and Ratatat. And I was clutching my phone with a severity of object attachment I hadn’t felt since the days of the pacifier. In an age where hookups, breakups, and makeups are increasingly initiated via text or online, the social dynamic of face-to-face interactions has changed drastically and in some cases disappeared entirely.

Read the rest of the article here. But first, maybe take a minute to smile at someone near you. (NB: It’s the mouth expression that looks like a sideways parenthesis.)

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An open letter to my husband’s boss at Gizmodo

Re: necessary compensation for my husband Jesus Diaz’s work writing about the iPad this weekend

Dear Brian Lam,

I need an iPad. Jesus just left for work and he took his.  He just put on his coat, took it and left! He was all, “Honey, you have a MacBook. And you can go use my desktop while I’m out.” He just has no concept of what it is I do all day. He thinks I need to sit at his big computer and work. No, what I need is a computer I can read on a bench in the dog park while Amos plays. I need to be able to read the paper. I don’t like reading it on my computer which means I read the paper a lot less than I’d like to. I’d go out and buy a real paper, but I don’t have $2.

But this isn’t so much a matter of money. Could any amount of money in the world buy a shoulder bag big enough to carry a calculator, a notebook, my phone, a pen, my wedding photos, Don Quixote, The Best of Leonard Cohen, a backgammon board, The New York Times, an etcha sketch, address book, and the fifth season of Weeds and something for Amos to chew on? That previous sentence may have sounded like some kind of “Look how amazing this thing is now let’s make comparisons to Mary Poppins’ carpetbag” or something, but that’s not what I meant. I meant that I realize now that I actually need all these things. I admit I find this a bit worrisome—I usually enjoy the experience of not needing something. Like, I’m really glad I don’t need to carry around an oxygen tank. So, I’m forced to question my motives: Is my brain no longer able to entertain itself? Has the “real” world ceased to be scintillating enough to capture my attention and curiosity? I don’t know. But it’s kind of like how it is when you really need a cigarette… Let me just find a light and then we can talk about lung cancer, okay? Also, there are at least five reasons why red wine may actually be good for you.

Brian, I am suffering. I miss it. The world is just no longer a place that makes sense.

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“Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles.”

Not usually the biggest David Brooks fan, but I can get behind his piece in today’s NYT:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

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Amanda Fortini has an interesting article about the iPhone on Salon today. It speaks to our increasing disloyalty to objects: with technology getting better/faster/cheaper/smaller with each passing month, the idea of keeping a TV or a phone for more than a couple of years has become passe.  The result is that there’s such a plethora of obsolete objects getting tossed out each day that even the needy are expecting that handouts won’t be more than one or two versions behind whatever is new. Try to give away a non-smartphone cellphone on Craigslist and you’ll be faced with an inbox with nothing in it. My local Goodwill recently started to turn down donations of televisions and monitors that aren’t flat screens.

“Planned obsolesnce” is often the culprit when this problem is discussed. The technology powers-that-be are constantly figuring out new ways to get us to spend more money to buy the same things over and over again; there’s a direct correlation between companies’ cunning ability to build relatively inexpensive self-destructing objects and consumers’ lack of patience with anything that isn’t working well. Spending $50 and two hours on the phone with the Geek Squad is somehow far more annoying than purchasing a brand new computer in ten minutes for $200.

I particularly liked the Fortini’s discussion of the iPhone’s buttons—or lack thereof. Push buttons are a subject of one of the essays in OBSOLETE. It seems to be modern man’s goal to solve problems that never really were problems to begin with. Have you heard anyone complain about how hard it is to push in a button? Ever? Nevertheless, there is an anti-button movement afoot. Elevators are starting to go un-buttoned. The Mac Tablet that everyone is speculating about has no buttons. And, of course, the iPhone has just one — cyclops-like. As I write this, I’m using a friend’s Apple mouse, which has no buttons; a massive, three-pane menu window keeps popping up whenever I tough the thing, which means that I’ve mostly been moving the cursor using sheer willpower (and the arrow buttons on the keyboard. It may be unfair of me, but I’m going to guess these two issues are related.  Excuse me now while I go scream into a pillow.

The iPod of its day

This summer marks the 30th anniversary of the invention of the Sony Walkman. Happy birthday, friend! Sony publicists are milking this moment for all its worth. I imagine this is because they’re gambling that no one will remember the Walkman at all when its next big birthday rolls around. Good press is one way to move stock: The Sony SRF-59 Radio Walkman is currently the 183rd most popular electronics product on Amazon, ranking it well above both the Roomba and the Hitachi Magic Wand vibraror. Or so I’ve been told.

The BBC News Magazine honored this great occasion with an essay by an eloquent thirteen-year-old (a clever ploy for publications that can’t afford to pay adult journalists…and don’t have access to monkeys). It took young Scott Campbell three days to figure out that the tape he was given had two sides. This wasn’t the only thing that confused him. “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette,” he writes. “I’m relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born.” Indeed. Had he been born in 1859, he’d now be dead. (These are the thoughts that pro journalists are paid to think.)

The BBC News Magazine also offers up an article on sturdy household objects that were made long before “planned obsolescence” was a familiar term. But really, the focus of the piece is Joan Archer, a 66-year-old from Pembrokeshire who has bravely used the the same Kenwood Chef food mixer since 1964. Long live print media.

100 Things Your Kids Will Never Know About

Over at Wired, one of the GeekDad’s has compiled a nice list called “100 Things Your Kids Will Never Know About.” Here are some highlights:

-Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the Internet.
-Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
-Neat handwriting.
-Swimming pools with diving boards.
-Looking out the window during a long drive.
-Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
-Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
-Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
-Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
-Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
-Starbuck being a man.
-Betamax tapes.

The list has gotten a lot of comments and Diggs, which I find heartening, considering that the whole thing reads a little like the contents page of Obsolete. I’d venture to say, however, that my effort is more devoted to the cause: unlike this free-to-read list, my musings come in the form of a book that will likely have to be paid for with money—and cash and books, of course, are both discussed therein. According to Wired’s Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, the notion of paying
for any kind of product at all might be obsolete all together. Anderson has been accused ofplagiarising Wikipedia in his book. Do you really want to support the theories of a plagiariser? If you don’t, then I’d suggest going straight to Amazon in order to spend old fashioned PayPal money on a pre-ordered edition…

I should mention that Obsolete started as a Washington Post Magazine article that can still be read online, free-of-charge.