What is it about technology, especially gadgets, that makes grown men and women, not to mention the tech media, behave like ditsy pre-teens at Disney? Here we have, this week, a world economy that's winding down like a tired clockwork toy. There are critical political elections, in France, in Burma, immense internal political strife in China and India, and what does everyone want to talk about?
A prototype of websurfing glasses showcased by Google, and the fact that the once-vestal Mac is no longer virgin from hackers. That's just this week. Take the amount of absolute mass hysteria that accompanies every annual launch of yet another iPad, or even the sheer scale of the global outpourings at the death of Steve Jobs, which seemed to rival that of Diana.
Before I carry on, I need to establish my credentials. I'm not a geek or a gizmo nut, but I'm not remotely technophobe either. I can't tweak my Linux OS to make my kitchen radio sing my playlist, but I know perfectly well how to navigate the back alleys of mobile and web technology.
I just don't like using my cellphone to play games and do apps, for precisely the same reasons I don't Tweet. I have a perfectly nice, monster powerful, high-end graphics computer to play games on, and every kind of attachment that lets me watch movies in HD. Why would I want to use a gadget that is essentially meant for talking to people and checking your mails to do all that? Except maybe at airport lounges, but they all have Wi-Fi now.
In case you asked, no, I don't Tweet, because I am a professional writer, and I respect words and sentences. You don't expect a professional actor to do two-minute impromptu mimes on the public road. I did Facebook when everyone else was still on Orkut, but I'm mindlessly, numbly bored of all the white noise in that site by now.
So yeah, is it really a matter of national and international importance, what widget or app, Facebook or Apple or Google are going to do next?
Let's take these virtual reality glasses Google is demonstrating. I've read reports ranging from how this will turn us all into cybermen, to what horrible things it will do to road safety. It's just a prototype, for heaven's sake. Sigh. People watch too many futuristic Hollywood sci-fi movies, but don't read enough sci-fi to get the big picture. As demonstrated, the Google goggles are like what vinyl records were to a future where you could be linked to cyberspace without using bulky intermediaries.
Next, as a lifetime myopic, I can assure you it will take a lot of marketing before convincing youngsters (or anyone) that it's cool to wear eyeglasses, however sleek, permanently. It's not a fashion accessory or even convenient. About the only personal-wear gadget that's survived its sell-by date are those dinky little earphones attached by near-invisible threads to your equally-invisible pocket music player. Remember those bulky Walkmans and Discmans?
People like their gadgets, they love them, they pay huge amounts of money for them, but usually, they like to play with their gadgets. Not to wear. Not yet at least. The only person who might want a virtual reality implant is someone like me, who hates lugging piles of widgets and wires and adaptors (or even a smartphone) around.
What I don't like about all this gizmo fervour is the pressure it puts on people to keep up with the latest whatchamacallit. Oh, I have a Kindle, but I must have the latest iPad, the most expensive smartphone I can't afford, and wow, must get those new goggs from Googs. Last time I was in India, tech gizmos are what everyone in what is already an almost hysterically status-symbol society, was flashing.
Unlike shoes, bags or even cars, where the basic item and its utility is obvious, when it comes to tech gizmos, most normal consumers don't really understand the utility of these things - so everything becomes a status symbol, by word of mouth and general hysteria.
Let's take classic consumerism: a shoe is a shoe and a car is a car. But almost everyone who uses them can tell the difference between a Porsche and a Nano, or a Bose sound system and a store brand variety, in absolute performance, as well as styling and branding.
It's not the same with gadgets. A smartphone that costs 15,000 works just as well as one that costs 70,000, and better. A cheapie netbook will pretty much do everything an iPad does, and more. It's the speed of your broadband or 3G that makes the difference. As a result, we end up with hordes of people proudly walking around with gadgets and widgets that look cool, say a lot of things about how with it you are, and give you minimal difference in value for money or performance. I know someone who has bought an iPad, even though they are smart enough never to use it for any real computing (it's just a toy), just because he has to maintain an image at all the silly corporate conferences he goes to.
In many ways, all these funky gadgets is a way that corporations are trying to use to make the internet less democratic and egalitarian - if you don't (pay extra) to get stuff from iTunes, or use even more exotic gadgets to surf the net or read e-books, you aren't cool. That's the message. And that message is a total lie. Cyberspace and the internet, which is what all of them depend and feed on, is fundamentally democratic, and mostly immune to social and class differentiation. Call it a force of nature (or human ingenuity) like fire and water and space, spectrum and cyberspace, it's just there. You don't need to spend a bomb to use it.
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