Age of Distractions

Recently, my smartphone conked out. So, while the new one was ordered but not yet delivered, I went back to an old Nokia feature phone. Boy, does it feel weird! A phone only meant for calling? No apps? No Internet? However did we live like this before the iPhone was launched? I remembered Thomas Ricker’s article:
“We're no longer in the age of flip phones and candy bars that shipped with dedicated start and end call buttons. Their raison d'être was voice calling.”

Sure, as Scott Adams says, smartphones have rewired us to a point where we always have a cloud hanging over us, the “mental distraction of simply knowing you might have a message if only you looked”. Not just from good old SMS’s, but Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Email. And yet, without the smartphone, I feel like I’ve gone “full-caveman”, as Adams put it.

Of course, you could argue that Distraction is a multi-billion dollar industry:
“Our largest and most important tech companies are literally in the business of distracting you with their advertisements and their apps. They design their products to maximize distraction, not efficiency, because your distraction is their profit.”
Having said that, Adams acknowledges:
“Don’t get me wrong. I think Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and the other tech giants are huge assets to humankind. (Okay, not the last three.)”
There! You heard the man: the smartphone is a huge asset to mankind. I got to go now: I am having smartphone withdrawal symptoms…

Comments

  1. KumarAugust 28, 2015 at 3:46 PM

    We all have been had!

    We all will continue to be had! Amen!!

    We all get gobbled up continuously, so that we won't get extinct! Great.
    Boy, what a contradiction! :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more