Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

More Stoopid-Fone

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot:

I think the health hazards of hand-helds are being deliberately downplayed by those who profit from them in the usual way. I also worry about the pace at which hand-helds find their surreally toxic wasteful way to landfill. I also think communication via tiny hand-held screens and keyboards turns people into imbeciles.

Books are a technology. To prefer durable demanding books to the superficial, imbecilizing, fragile (you'll see!) iFraud twitterverse is not to be a technophobe, but to prefer better artifacts and techniques to crappy ones.

I don't doubt that hand-helds facilitate some novel and desirable practices (human beings are crafty and creative beings after all), but to the extent that they become our epochal mediator, they mostly facilitate cultural suck in my view.

5 comments:

admin said...

Bad news, Dale: Smartphones will surpass PC shipments in 2 years.

Dale Carrico said...

Why you wanna hurt me so bad, Martin?

Dale Carrico said...

We'll see if that's still true when the shipments come on sailing ships after Peak Oil, yeah, that's the ticket.

jimf said...

> I. . . think communication via tiny hand-held screens and
> keyboards turns people into imbeciles. . .
>
> [T]o the extent that they become our epochal mediator,
> they mostly facilitate cultural suck in my view.

I sat through a meeting a few weeks ago, listening to my boss
opine that any software developer who wanted to get ahead
in our (rather large) organization would start thinking
**now** about how to port applications and interfaces
currently running on the organization's desktop (Windows)
PCs to iPads and iPhones.

Uh-**huh**.

No one said much during the meeting (no one ever does),
but there was a bit of giggling and eye-rolling after
it broke up (at least on my part).

Impertinent Weasel said...

For some reason, a lot of people seem to think Apple makes the iPhone.

This is obviously not true. The Chinese make the iPhone, and it's Apple that shows us how bright, good-looking, and rich we can be if we own one.

Thank heavens.