I am reading “Simplexity,” the 2008 book by J. Kluger. He writes:
"Electronic devices … have gone mad. It is not just your TV or your camera or your twenty-seven-button cell phone with its twenty-one different screen menus and its 124-page instruction manual. … The act of buying nearly any electronic product has gone from the straightforward plug-and-play experience it used to be to a laborious, joy-killing experience in unpacking, reading, puzzling out, configuring, testing, cursing, reconfiguring, stopping altogether to call the customer support line, then calling again an hour or two later, until you finally get whatever it is you’ve bought operating in some tentative configuration that more or less does all the things you want it to do–at least until some error message causes the whole precarious assembly to crash and you have to start it all over again. … "
After elaborating on this topic (for several pages), the author concludes that “there’s necessarily complex and then there’s absurdly complex.”
What he does not analyze, at least in the chapter I am reading, is the effect all this may have on the minds of our push-button youngsters. Push-button experience is very different from building radios, repairing grandfather clocks, tractors, cars, etc. Will the overall effect be positive or negative? What do you think?
If you look at shakespeare so many of his metaphors come from trades and guilds, people workign with their hands on natural materials - ones that can be fairly easily connected to where they were in nature before they became resources. When I was kind most play was free and required fairly simple devices, if any. A ball, for example, something that was available, though not signed by a superstar as far as I know, thousands of years back in time to indigenous cultures. We went out and in groups or pairs came up with stuff to do. So there is a distance, we are getting further and further away from something, the planet, our own bodies maybe. Homo sapians seem a little passe, vulgar, boring.
Image, explosions, image, text, ring, mail, tweet, image, explosion…thumbs or all fingers twitching rapidly, eyes flipping back and forth like in REM sleep.
Mind sugar all the time.
My first thought was whether this thread belongs in psychology or sociology.
But beyond that and more to the point, the end result of this action is that the homosapian species will terminate.
That which keeps the species alive is being replaced by that which doesn’t need the species to be alive.
They can push their own buttons.
Maybe the human race is going extinct, let me think, I could live another 50 years, could it wait until then? I do my part, I don’t have a cell phone, and I even had tried getting one once many years ago. I bought one at a store and the damn phone wouldn’t work, I kept it for a while as a calculator, but surprisingly this state-of-the-art phone didn’t have as many functions as an old calculator I found made in the 80s.
I rarely free up my phone line for calls, so I tell people to ‘text’ my email, and then my email starts making noise on my computer, it works as well as having a phone.