On Thursday I saw a puddle on the kitchen floor at work. Then I heard a gentle hissing of water. The little water heater in the cabinet under the sink was leaking. One valve served both branches - hot and cold, so I reached in and shut it off. I also rescued the pile of dreck half-submerged inside the cabinet: bungee cords, a bucket, some cleaning supplies. Some kitchen towels were staying dry on top of the bucket. That was nice.
I went down the hall to notify some people of the problem. My boss gets a martyr complex sometimes, so when I inform her of a problem, suddenly she starts bitching about “Why do I have to be the one to do this?”. That might be more effective than doing nothing, but it doesn’t really qualify as ‘teamwork’. We need a plumber. We don’t know if we are entitled to one under our rental agreement. That sort of information seems very compartmentalized here - or maybe I’m just outside of that compartment? It doesn’t matter: Managers at the stores call me (that’s tech support for you!) with crazy problems all the time. You could say they haven’t been empowered. It’s rare for an underpaid retail manager to have the resources or experience that they need to tackle whatever comes along. I worry further that there has always been a “play it by ear” mentality here, and it isn’t served well by staff turnover and attrition. Meanwhile, the head honcho is always frustrated that nobody ever acts on their own initiative. Hasn’t this always been a fine balance? You never want to have to tell anybody what to do, but you still can’t stand it when they don’t do what you wanted them to.
The lack of a hot water heater in the kitchen creates all sorts of logistical problems in my mind. But then again, my sister lives in the woods… No, see: hot water isn’t the problem: It’s the inseparability of the hot from the cold. You can just imagine how triumphant they were when they realized they could save on a valve. To builders who are long gone when there is a problem, this is pure gold. They probably even got to charge for the missing valve. Well, now I’m being uncharitable.
Posted in olssons, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 22 Jun 2008 14:08:00 GMT
No silly, it’s Rock Band the Video Game.
One of the bars in my neighborhood has installed the video game and lets people play on Tuesday nights. It used to be karaoke. People got tired of karaoke, the staff more than anyone, I’m guessing. Two things worry me about this game.
First, it’s similar to the nostalgic exercise of playing old ‘hit’ songs to evoke a golden past. Just as with karaoke, you align yourself with the pleasant memory and live vicariously through the cultural product of the recorded song. Not all of this is a bad thing. But, I’m beginning to sense the pathos of it: People taking excessive association with a life they never lived, instead of doing something new, creative, and possibly just as fun. By this method we abdicate. The future is less rich. I don’t worry too much though - I imagine future teenage rebellions to invigorate culture in our wake. This is another wave of the stultifying effects of reproduction on our relationship to the works of art.
Second, and more disturbing is the bad feeling I get from all of the members of this video game family: “Dance, Dance Revolution” and “Guitar Hero” have been popular in Japan first. The games had to be ‘localized’ for American shores by stocking them with the pop songs from our charts. Every one of these games operates on the same basic principle: Simon Says. When I was a kid, we had the electronic Simon game with the four big buttons that lit up in a sequence that you had to repeat… In my mind, all the fancy guitar and drum controllers and the silly rock avatars playing on their virtual stage on the monitor do not change the basic principle at work here: You do what the machine tells you. Your score quantifies how well you obey. Is this the future? People sure look like they’re having fun doing it. “The first Matrix was designed to be a perfect world - Where everyone would be happy…”
And, the funny thing about the songs themselves: They’re not all necessarily popular hits - they’re specifically considered ‘hard rock’. This makes sense with the Black Sabbath or Soundgarden. But then you get to the grey areas - Weezer makes some sense, but R.E.M.? I could go on. We all have our personal favorites. I suspect there is some interest in crushing this out of us, though. Marketing is certainly much easier if we all like the same stuff for the same reasons.
Well, I’ve never played. My friends have tried to push me into it. It probably is fun, I won’t doubt that. Most nights when I’ve seen it, I get a real serious craving to go home and play my real guitar. I’ve even said it out loud. My reclusive habits are not the issue. It would be fun to jam with some people on other real instruments. I’m just not sure I know many people who do play. The game has levels you can set individually for the four players. It simplifies the task by presenting more or less decimated ‘fake-book’ sequences you have to match. The microphone checks your pitch and ‘gate times’ to score. There are bonuses for improv in clearly marked sections.
Posted in music, ontology, bar-scene, computer-interface | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:53:00 GMT
Finally, some photos taken within the last four hours. These were some rushed shots from my walk to the bus stop this morning. I spotted the broken car mirror lying in the alley when I was headed to the coffee shop. I decided to risk the rearrangement of the object by passing trucks for a few minutes while I bought my espresso - I usually backtrack past this point to get to the bus stop. Besides, my camera was in my bag, and I was carrying the laptop bag, too. All a bit cumbersome. When I got back, I set my coffee down and circled my prey for the right lighting conditions and a good angle with enticing reflections in the broken bits of mirror. A couple people walked past and must have thought I was crazy. That’s one of the frustrating things about vision. Other people don’t necessarily see it too.
At the bus stop I still had my camera out, so I looked around for something worth capturing. I’ve spent a lot of time at that bus stop, so it never seems like a promising place. I suddenly remembered that I arrived at work the other day with a little seed pod riding on a crease in my laptop case. I couldn’t work out where it came from at first, so it’s sitting on my desk in front of the computer monitor getting dry and wrinkled. I put my chin on the top of the stone wall surrounding Meridian Hill Park, and saw those seed pods scattered around. So I went for some shallow depth-of-field shots. Of course, at this point, my bus pulled up. Can’t get one of those things when you need it - but start taking photographs (or some people just light a cigarette) and it’s prompt service. Well, I don’t really like this version. For the first shot, my camera decided to flash(!?!?). I guess it was dark in the magical wonderland of the park. But, it always takes an agonizingly long time to return to operating voltage after the flash fires. Granted, it’s only about three seconds, but as I said, the bus was on its merry way. I didn’t need to shoot photos for another ten minutes, or however long it would take for the next bus to come. Deliberately letting a bus pass by always seems to tempt fate. I think the conditions will be identical tomorrow - barring some kind of catastrophe, so maybe I’ll plan to look again then.
Posted in photos, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:56:00 GMT
I liked how this article Distracting Miss Daisy in The Atlantic meshed right into the stuff I’ve been reading lately. The writer says they do traffic control better in the UK, and it results in fewer deaths. But mainly, I was interested in the claim that having so many signs to warn drivers takes their eyes away from the road. I seem to remember thinking that way back when I drove regularly.
This item on Infowars, Secret Plan To Kill Internet By 2012 Leaked? had the interesting element of wondering whether a YouTube video was a hoax. And then, realizing that it didn’t matter anyway. Even if the video is only looking for attention (check out the cleavage on that interviewer! - not very professional), what they are talking about is very real. I encourage you to look further into “Network Neutrality”, because it’s on the slippery slope to a dystopian future of corporate slavery. Then again, there’s nothing in the constitution that says you can’t gradually rewrite the whole thing through the years to completely oppose the spirit of the original.
For a minute, I was thinking that this represented a naive idea about what an internet is, but I see the danger. The web could probably “go underground”, but that would only encourage the actual criminalization of the activity on it - the premise seems to be that governments want to lock down this aspect of free speech to stop terrorists. Even if it’s true, it’s still a red herring. The sort of content that draws most people to the Web is exactly the sort of content I could happily live without. For the most part, this content is already on a broadcast model. Social networking and video uploads are a threat to that model, so the people who derive power and money from broadcast would naturally want to block it - or as they do now, leave it as an incubator and steal all the good ideas. These types are understandably uncomfortable with individuals expressing their own opinions. It messes up the status quo. I guess if I were rich and powerful, I would get pretty excited about the ‘status quo’, too.
The Infowar site itself is a bit lurid. I enjoy the irony that fringe ideas require flashy animated banner ads - as if plain text wasn’t exciting enough. It’s that very mode of attention-grabbing that undermines sober analysis of issues. We get what we deserve - two sides shouting over each other to be heard.
The article also mentions: “The U.S. Government wants to force bloggers and online grassroots activists to register and regularly report their activities to Congress.”
I haven’t been writing a lot of politics: this is still a fairly mundane account of what goes on in my personal life. It’s so boring some days, I don’t even bother to report. But this distrust of citizens is the sort of thing that will radicalize me. Report my activities? I thought that was in the text of the blog. The intention was to report my activities on the site. Of course, I did just say that I omit a lot.
On to Media Mindlessness: I didn’t catch this one on the Internet, I saw the local news hyping the video. Local news is now completely useless. They get fooled all the time - they’re only good for amusement. Check out Timur Bekmambetov Punks the World With Viral Video from Cinematical. I figured it was something like that. A video surfaces of a guy freaking out in an office, and some junior TV news producer spots it. From there it’s a short hop to millions of viewers. They don’t even bother to authenticate anything - that’s the legacy of so many years of entertainment reporting. If you really think about it, your life isn’t substantially different without it. Not only have people been suckered by marketing, but the news can’t even be trusted anymore. My personal reaction is that I can’t trust anything I hear. Which will probably get me killed some day when the news is both true and important.
If only there were some fable about irresponsible boys giving false alarms until they can’t be believed anymore!
Posted in media-studies, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:03:00 GMT
I am one of those people who think that high gasoline prices are a good thing. You have probably guessed that I do not drive a car. I know some people who do drive cars, and who rely on them quite heavily.
This is not my opportunity to stake out a radical environmentalist platform. I just think we’ve organized our world wrong.
Beside all this are the price manipulations. I will usually trust markets to find the correct price of a commodity, but there are other issues at work: Taxes that vary by state. Oil companies that may or may not be in collusion. Extravagant and destructive uses for fuel (ahem!, NASCAR). These are the things that bend markets. And, I suspect that $4 for a gallon of gasoline is quite low. We will probably look back at this time in history and say we didn’t know how good we had it.
Some people are just determined to keep driving. They can’t really be blamed, though. Somebody spread their world out over a vast expanse. I wouldn’t presume to tell people they should never leave their square mile. But, I do think that making it expensive to do will cause a change in priorities. At first it will be painful: A lot of people don’t have much going on in their square mile. There may not be a grocery store. Or employment of any sort. That sounds like a mistake to me. How can people stand to drive so much? I like to drive. But not every day. And, I hate to commute. It is time wasted, whether or not you pay for the gasoline.
I live in a city. I grew up in the suburbs. I would never go back there. As it is, the city is bad enough. Suburbs are absurd. I can imagine making the city better, but I can’t imagine making the suburbs better. Some days my city seems weirdly hollow and empty. If you thought cities would be crowded, you don’t live where I do. In part, I blame the automobile, but it is a side effect of the road infrastructure necessary for truck deliveries. The public space is practically all road. In my daydreams, I think of burying all the roads, just like the water and sewer pipes. We need those roads, but I don’t want to have to look at them - just as you wouldn’t run the sewer pipes down the middle of the road, and have to climb over them to get anywhere. I like having a grocery store across the street, with the grapes from South America and whatnot, but some day one of those 18-wheelers is going to run me down backing into the loading dock.
Human communities need density. There have to be some other people nearby. Try to imagine for a minute that we used our energy and industry creating livable cities.
Come to think of it, suburban development is just like drilling for oil. The faster you do it, the quicker that resource runs out. Are you going to be pleased with how you spent that resource, or are you just going to be pleased that you had the opportunity to make a quick buck? We have this terrible history of racing to use up our resources. Actually competing to see who could destroy it all quickest - rewarding the ‘winners’.
For all the people who think that some new technology will solve all our problems - can we start talking about how that is going to happen? All the past solutions came from people who started working on the problem before it was a crippling disability. Science and technology are often driven by a kind of intellectual play: Not intended to be solutions to anything. In other words, we stock our shelves with solutions. If we stopped doing that, would you notice? Alternative fuels are a good example of this. But if you think this process extends to the gross phenomenon of matter, I think you are mistaken. When we run out of rural land to redevelop as suburbs, what is the next step? Glass domes? Moon colonies? Drain the oceans? There are sure to be solutions proposed.
Posted in urban-studies, ontology, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:10:00 GMT
I was thinking about the problem of confusing tools with luxuries. It’s the gadget culture of the computer age: People who need information technology the most are the people who can afford it the least. The advantages conferred by computers, smart phones, organizers, etc., will continue to go disproportionately to the people who are already the best informed and organized.
And why is that? Because each one of these tools also functions as a decadent luxury item. I can play games all day on my laptop, I can browse frivolous websites that track celebrity gossip, or chat mindlessly on the phone with friends. It is an inescapable marriage of power and convenience. Hammers and wrenches lacked that kind of entertainment value. We have never been at such an advantage over the world - And we have never had the power to blow it quite so efficiently.
It didn’t have to be this way. Maybe it all comes down to self-discipline. If I lived a monastic life, maybe I could ignore the time-wasting (ahem!.. entertainment) capabilities of my gadgets, but that won’t change the fact that much of their value now relates to those capabilities. As the kit-computers of the techno-geeks have become the streamlined consumer electronics gadgets, the utility functions have been dwarfed. It’s still possible to use most micro-chip based devices as a tool, but the social reality is that few people do. The manufacturers even do what they can to downplay those uses (self-sufficiency doesn’t generate new pay-per-view download charges!). Talk up self-discipline all you want, but it’s not so simple when it looks like everybody else is having so much fun. It’s like trying to meditate at a party.
Today, if you made a computerized tool that couldn’t entertain, nobody would want it - it would be subject to supply and demand just like everything else. Since computers are general-purpose, and you can add software to do anything you want, there is extra work involved in reducing capability.
I often look at new product announcements - like the iPhone - and see only the frivolous. They sell the frivolous end. They’ve been writing software for decades to enhance the time-wasting aspects. Because that is what will improve sales. I refuse to believe that this is a more productive society - or at least I worry that the crash is coming soon.
I also have to consider my personal problems. That’s where the self-discipline really matters. It isn’t likely that I can make much of a name for myself espousing a puritan view of technology (would it sell?). It’s easy enough to spend all this money on ‘tools’, protest that the money is well spent, then use my ‘tools’ to entertain myself. It’s positively delusional.
Like any normal person, I’ve stuck a balance. It’s an unstable balance, though: I’m constantly in danger of slipping all the way down to the 0% efficiency mark. It may be an even deeper current in society that makes possible the ‘enjoyable job’. I’m frequently reading anecdotal evidence of people who have constructed a career out of doing something fun (and, this deliberately ignores all professional sports). Some of my hobbies might find a place in the sun, and I engage in them as an enjoyable refuge, no doubt. But it’s an interesting hybrid category, is it not? The hobby. Like people who take stamp collecting seriously… Obsessive research and acquisition, subordinating other pleasures to what is ostensibly unpaid work. It seems like a dead-weight loss to me on a good day: I can’t figure out how it enriches society, even inadvertently. In an economic reality, this is a kind of stolen time. No enjoyment seems enjoyable enough to me to justify the real costs. We fall all over ourselves to report how much money is involved in the entertainment industry, but isn’t it a phantom? Are you trying to tell me that we wouldn’t have spent that money on something else? That we would have saved it?
Posted in economics, ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 27 May 2008 15:23:00 GMT
I picked up a galley of Kath Weston’s “Traveling Light”. One of the perks of a low-paid job in book retailing is that sometimes I get to read a book before you do. But getting my hands on something four months early is rare these days. With a tall stack of current books that I’m trying to read, it’s tough to make room. Starting a book such as this one is pure serendipity. The shelves full of paperback galleys are signally unappealing at first glance. And, as with most bookshelves, only a small fraction of the books are going to interest me… But that works out to more than I can possibly read anyway.
I may be predisposed to think bad things about my country. Don’t take that the wrong way. Know your history. Then we can talk about what needs to be done. The problem is, the people who make the rules assume everybody is just like them. And, when you make rules that favor your kind, it’s a clear conflict of interest. Furthermore, if you’re going to get up on the world stage and talk about things like a “Trickle Down Economy”, then the onus should be on you to prove it. Instead, people file away that fact and go back to what they were doing. By the millions. If the economy is revving and we have a “Trickle Down Economy”, then that’s proof enough that poor people are doing well. Wait… What?
And how can I trust the media. Without getting into all the corporate consolidation stuff or hurling insults (cough Lapdog! cough), we can just say: TV plays to the people who take the luxury car ads seriously. Not the people riding the Greyhound halfway across the country.
Weston’s thesis is that these are the people with the most insightful analysis of the situation. They’re not walled off from reality like the men in suits running the IMF or hanging out in Davos. They’re not insulated from the shocks, so they’ve got the information first hand. They didn’t have to read it in some glossy report. (Pie Chart or Bar Graph? What do you think, Kelly?)
I remember my aging grandmother visiting us when I was a kid. Until my grandfather died, they would travel around in their Winnebago, but later on, in some mixture of trip mileage, convenience, frugality, and generational mistrust of airplanes, she arrived by bus from Ohio. She didn’t enjoy the journey very much. Voice dripping with innuendo, she told us that a certain “kind of people” rode buses. Clearly, a kind of people that she didn’t enjoy being cooped up with. And one of my parents called her on it: “What ‘kind of people’ ride the bus? You just did.” Thanks, Kath. I hadn’t thought about that in years: It’s only human nature to aspire.
Posted in ontology, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 19 May 2008 17:03:00 GMT
On the heels of New Ways Of Watching, I found a link to the Internet Archive’s September 11th Television Archive. Yes, that September 11th.
The most startling thing about the Greil Marcus book “The Shape Of Things To Come” was a batch of quotes that began the Introduction. Some of them were direct responses to that day, and others were uncanny parallels from other sources. It’s chilling in a new way to read from Moby Dick: “The ship! Great God, where is the ship?”
We have here a deeper sort of patriotism: As the book proceeds, we meet a number of characters, real and fictional, who say “This nation you speak of sounds terrific - We shouldn’t wait another minute to create it!” It’s almost as if the history of America so far is only the design phase. Some testing, perhaps. And a lot of voices crying out “When is it going to get here?” and “Where is this great America you speak of? We’d like to live there.”
As soon as I started reading, I knew it was only a matter of time before I would seek out the television coverage. It’s been years now, and part of me wants to have a sinister laugh at the expense of the news producers, and their vapid morning-show ‘lifestyle’ segments. But another part is curious how to correct the nonsense inherent. Inherent because they’re so desperate to share what they know as soon as they can - even if it turns out to be wrong later. Sooner rather than Righter.
Some other time perhaps… I’ll give a fuller account of my day. But know this: I watched as little TV as possible. I was as caught off guard as they were. I never would have been watching at the critical moment - when they had to break in - that I can watch today in the archives. The news came to me word-of-mouth, and I even saw some smoke rising from some unknown point on the horizon. There was plenty of panic to go around that day, but it didn’t touch me. A kind of luck, if you want to put it that way. I thought people were overreacting, and mostly I was right. I get the world we live in a little better since that day: It’s a delicate balance. Where were you expecting to go? Drive out onto a gridlocked highway? DC isn’t even all that crowded. Most people could have just soldiered on. I only left work because my girlfriend’s coffee shop closed and sent her home. Whatever danger there was to me would be the same at home as at work. Nobody could say what they were running from. Most likely, they were going to pick up their kids who would be turned out from some middle school in Manassas or Germantown for the day. By the millions.
But Wait, There’s Another Reason…
I didn’t even consider this at first, but I’ve been reading the Charles Perrow book “The Next Catastrophe”. His thesis is that we worry too much about defense (too much, I said…), and that we could reduce our vulnerability to all kinds of disasters accidental or deliberate by spreading out the danger.
He considers at least one case of a railroad tank car leaking chlorine gas. When workers at a chemical plant have to evacuate, they can no longer monitor other dangerous processes. You could see a cascading failure. When you consider it, emergency responders are often heroes precisely because they rush in without all the information. And, like I’ve been saying, how do you know what to tell everybody else? What’s the best advice when you don’t even know what leaked, or exploded?
And let’s not forget that we put dangerous industries - threats to our health and existence - in private hands. Is this what you would call “Homeland Security”? Allow fierce cost-cutting and sham drills at a power plant to ‘maximize shareholder value’?
Posted in ontology, film-and-TV, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 11 May 2008 22:13:00 GMT
I’ve been trying to digest this news for days now. It’s obvious after you hear it.
Clay Shirky wrote “Here Comes Everybody”. I haven’t read it yet - it’s one of those Internet/Sociology books on my radar. He gives lectures too.
I saw an excerpt of “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” this Sunday on Boing Boing, titled “Death of the Sitcom Frees Up 2,000 Wikipedias Worth of Cognitive Capacity”, which oddly enough sounded like it was going to be about something else, like a prediction of the future of TV. So I dove into the story expecting to see something else, not really registering the second half of the title. Well, I nearly wept. I had to calm myself down; talk myself out of it. “Forget the past, just move forward in the right direction.”
And, today looking at the original, it still had that force - like a kick in the chest. But, once again I have to tell myself to relax - it’s not the end of the world, exactly. This is one of the more hopeful messages I’ve heard lately… Shirky isn’t upset, and neither should I be. What he describes is the revving of the world’s engine right as we’re about to engage the clutch. This could be a very dynamic time right ahead of us.
Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it?
Incidentally, this following remark captures an essential feature of my job:
“This information may or may not exist some place in society, but it’s actually easier for me to try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the authorities who might have it now.”
I’ve rebuilt a lot of information in a different form because nobody wants to wait for a report to run on the mainframe, but on a typical day, I’ve got several hours to prepare for that moment.
I think a lot of our TV situation has to do with the “Audience Metric”. A whole lot of time and effort was put into maximizing the audience during the golden age of sitcoms. Add cable TV to that mix, and all the channels you could ever want, and lower the price of professional gear, and the spell is broken. But I wonder about the corollary to all this: Not only are audiences divided up, but people are also busier “producing content”. It could be a whole lot more ‘talking’ and a lot less ‘listening’. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing.
But also, we all feel the need to vegetate with some passive entertainment now and then. I suppose this is the natural break on the depopulating of the audience.
Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.
Got that? “The Medium Is The Message” a la Marshall McLuhan. And one of the explicit messages here is: You can do this too. Whether it’s a picture of a cat with a silly caption, or fan-fiction spin-offs of your favorite TV show, or an Encyclopedia of a wizard book.
So tell me: Why would I aspire to create content? I wouldn’t. I might just create it anyway. When a couple hundred bucks is all you need to write a book or ‘film a movie’ (whatever that means), you don’t dream of success and scheme to overcome barriers - there aren’t any barriers. What’s that going to be like. What amazing things will we aspire to instead?
And my first answer to that question is: The things that used to be too big or too complicated to even dream of doing.
Perhaps I’ll see you there.
Posted in ontology, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:04:00 GMT
I don’t see the value in having a mobile phone yet. The two people who call me at odd times and expect me to pick up would prefer it if I had one, but they both eventually reach me. My sister (one of those two) seemed visibly agitated when she came to town and couldn’t talk to me any time she wanted to. A couple other people know to rely on email or call me at work. My last girlfriend (not sure I want another one after that experience…) seemed to have trouble communicating over email, and just had to talk to me over the phone - even though it was clear to me that it didn’t improve the communication any. So, in my limited experience, you can see that I have encountered several different attitudes.
Then there is my attitude: Telephone calls are an interruption. There is never a good time for you to call me. Answering the phone has a tendency to wipe my mind clean. I can’t remember what I was working on or thinking about, and I resent that. And since I’m talking to you, I resent you too. It’s going to take me some time to recover. Okay… I overdramatized that, but that’s basically what happens.
Here’s the formula: When having a phone becomes a valuable opportunity that can outweigh the distraction, then it will make sense for me to have one. I can’t square my memories of housewives getting phones to carry in case they get a flat tire on some West Texas highway with rattlesnakes, hillbillies, and UFOs with teenage girls texting their classmates from the Metro bus. I’m not looking forward to becoming a slave to my pocket phone. Maybe when I get one, I’ll only put the number on resumes - not tell anyone else. That way I’ll know what to expect when it rings. But it hardly matters, because…
If my phone rings when I’m on the bus, or as I’m walking on a rainy day, I won’t be prepared to talk to anybody. This is in itself a pretty good argument for never leaving the house - where I already have a land-line. If I need to be prepared to talk business with people at all hours of the day, then how can I ever leave my desk?
Consider, if you will, my PC: It’s a heavy sucker with good computing muscle. I didn’t choose this model for portability. I wasn’t planning to work sitting in the park or riding on the bus. A PC with my whole life loaded on it takes several minutes to start up and shut down anyway. I wanted “transportability” more than “portability”. I don’t mind carrying the weight. My vision of this computer was exactly how I’m using it today - and pretty much every day: For multi-hour sessions sitting next to a wall plug. At my apartment, in the office, or at a coffeeshop. It doesn’t seem worth it to switch it on if I’m not going to go longer than a fresh battery would last. Working on a park bench would be nice, but I can’t focus on the task if I do that. Sunlight makes the screen unviewable anyway. I prefer to work in a darkened room, where I will not be too distracted by the stuff in the room with me.
All of this complaining would be a serious waste of time if I didn’t have some suggestions:
I occasionally need to walk around with a phone, just as on occasion it might be nice to have a car. Can I just rent a phone when I need one? Aren’t there disposable phones with prepaid minutes? I’m not too excited about committing to an expensive phone and calling plan only to find out that I hate it. Where can somebody test drive these services? How simple is it to have my home number temporarily forward to a rented or throwaway mobile? Is this something that other countries have (I’m thinking of the islands: UK and Japan), but we do not? If I travel somewhere (especially if I were traveling to a job interview) it would be very valuable to have a phone. But day to day? No way.
One of the things that bug me about other people and their phones is: People become stupid when they rely on the phone. Being out on a limb used to encourage people to get the facts straight, but now you can blindly wander toward your destination and call when you get close. “Hi, I didn’t bother to figure out where you are!”… Sounds like an idiot to me.
Phones are the only handy device sometimes when they are not the best device: And texting might be nice if it were not more expensive than calling.
I am engaged in an endless struggle over how to deploy my attention among a range of different pressing needs. But, I also worry that you are engaged in the same struggle, so I am unlikely to ring your phone out of some primal Golden Rule. This explains a lot about why that girlfriend I mentioned was frustrated with me and left - she thought I didn’t call enough. But if you’re anything like me, sitting around gabbing on the phone is not your idea of togetherness. It so often substituted for real planning and communication.
Posted in ontology, relationship-angst, telecom | 3 comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:35:00 GMT
