Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
Voices of dissent (but not on a cellphone), stop the seal hunt, and the "life expectancy watch"
Mickey, do you know if the radio show be archived somewhere? My Internet connection went down last night…
By the way, anyone interested in a follow up story to the Reuters soundman being murdered by a US sniper can go here:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L29376043.htm
US forces are still holding the cameraman wounded in the incident.
Posted by James on from Puerto Rico 08/30 at 08:29 AMA few people have asked me about the archive. I’ll try to find out ASAP.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 08/30 at 10:04 AMi have a bit of a history with cellphones.
i held off from getting one for years. then my ex-girlfriend and aunt conspired to get me one so i kept it for enough time that it wouldn’t look like i was being ungrateful and then dropped it down 5 flights of stairs.
my friend then gave me a spare one he had. people were arguing at a party and i got bored with trying to reason with them and just microwaved the phone. i learned 2 lessons from this...1 - microwaved phones retain their heat a long time and 2- doing something stupid stops an argument far quicker than trying to reason with people (note to world leaders - i mean this is in a personal sense. don’t do something stupid to solve world disputes and if you don’t trust yourself not to to anything stupid just don’t do anything ok)
someone else gave me one and i accidentally (honestly - this time it was an accident) dropped it into a glass of water.
finally, just after that the network i was on sent me new phone for nothing which i still have. i smashed the screen when i was annoyed tho and i don’t know how long it will last. i am not giving them 10 pounds for a piece of plastic.
Posted by michael on from scotland 08/30 at 10:27 AMGee, Michael, you make me wanna finally get a cellphone just so I can torture it.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 08/30 at 10:35 AMmy friends have a lot of fun with that story about the microwave but it just occurred to me that there is a reciprocity thing going on there...it was microwaving me so i ....
only just figured that out!
i teach classes occasionally and one of my students with a horrified look and a shiver said how she just couldn’t possibly see how people got by in the days before mobile phones. i think i offended the class when i said that people used to use their wits rather than their phones.
also, despite being a serial destroyer of them they may have some unexpected uses. i will quote a wee bit of this and then the link underneath if people want to read more of it. and yes, i am aware that the researched mentioned in the bit i quote comes from someone who works for a corporation and therefore has a vested interest… that may not negate the possibility of some truth in what he is saying…
“But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.
However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. “We are herd animals,” he says. “These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving.” Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will “bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.”
We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.”
from douglas adams article “how to stop worrying and learn to love the internet.
full thing here http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.htmlPosted by michael on from scotland 08/30 at 11:12 AM>>>Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will “bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.”<<<
Hogwash.
MZ, I loved the totallyabsurd.com site...especially the ad for The Johnny Light on the index page. A greenish glow coming from the toilet could SAVE a marriage?? It’d destroy any relationship I ever had...my lack of sleep as I watched the toilet glowing unhealthily, experiencing fear and paranoid fantasies of the toilet Coming To Get Me, would drive any man I ever lured into my bed away pronto.
Posted by Richard the Curmudgeon on from Cellphonelessland 08/30 at 11:31 AMnever said i completely agreed with it but you should explain why you think it is hogwash.
there is a distinction between what something IS used for and what it COULD be used for.
Posted by michael on from scotland 08/30 at 11:44 AMYes, Richard...please tell the whole class what you mean by “hogwash.”
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 08/30 at 12:14 PMWhen my daughter was about 12 years old, she was angry that our Nintendo machine was broken, so she couldn’t play video games. She called a few of her friends, just to talk, but, she couldn’t really! talk because “her stupid family” was always right near by. We were “too cheap” to get a cell phone, so she could talk outside, away from all of us ‘listeners.’ We wouldn’t even get her a phone for her room! Moreover, there was nothing to watch on TV because her mother and I were “too stupid” to get cable or satellite. There was, she whined, NOTHING to do.
I told her that, when I was a kid, there were no video games at all. None. There were no cell phones. In fact, all phones were “tied” to something by a cord, so one could not even walk around much, while talking on the phone. There were no CD players, or tape players either, so if you weren’t at home, you could only get your music from a radio. There was no cable or satellite TV, at all. And there were only three tv channels. There was no Fox or WB. Nobody had any of these things. And none of my friends had a phone in their room - phones were too expensive!Well, that was one of those very, very rare moments in my “parenting” experience, when the child just became quiet and still for a moment. Then, she looked up at me with wide, confused, sad eyes, and said, sincerely:
“Oh! Were you… happy?”Posted by joe on from Oregon 08/30 at 02:24 PMBTW - I bought one of those life-expectancy watches recently, and it arrived today. I think it’s broken, however. It says: 3 days, 10 minutes.
That can’t be right, can it?Posted by joe on from Oregon 08/30 at 02:29 PMNah, it was supposed to read: 3 days, 10 hours.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 08/30 at 02:41 PMA Reprieve! Thanks, Mickey.
Posted by joe on from Oregon 08/30 at 03:09 PMHogwash all over again!
>>>Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will “bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology.”<<<
Technology never solves problems it created in the first place without creating more and newer problems in their stead. Cases: Antibiotics. More and more people survived formerly dread diseases, including me, that would once have killed them. I question whether this is prima facie a good thing already, but look what this techno-solution hath wrought: resistanceless populations beset with superbugs that have, over their millions of generations, bred resistance to our overused and ill-considered weapon the antibiotic. Cell Phones: The anomie that argualbly was casued by the fragmenting effect of technologies like TV and the Internet isn’t being *cured* by pervasive instant distance communication, and I argue it’s barely being palliated. My friends from pre-Internet days are still available to me by technological means, but we had a connection to begin with and to build on; the friends I’ve made online and only online, f/ex, have been largely able to transition into real-life friendships if they’re about 35 and up; younger folks have trouble knowing how to deal with me-in-the-flesh because I don’t come with emoticons and 1337-speak silliness.
I reiterate a case I consider a strong one: Palliation is not solution, and that’s what I see this pervasive wireless hoo-hah as...palliation.
Posted by Richard the Curmudgeon on from Ludd's Land 08/30 at 03:09 PMThe NYT, within a week’s time published the article you cite, and a FRONT PAGE article on how peole living in rural Africa (don’t remember the location, but it takes hours to get drinking water there...) keep in touch with family members working hours away via cell phone. Technology had (per the article) saved these people… My immediate reaction: “I cannot make it down the length of the LIE from NYC to my home on the Nassau County border (about 12 miles, in an urban location), without losing reception at least twice. Between my home and my offices, each 15 minute rides (in opposite directions), there are, again at least 2 “dead zones” with no reception. How is it possible that they can have service in rural Africa, but not in NYC??? No reception in the subways (not that I think talking in the subway is ideal, but the inconsistency of this baffles me.)
Posted by Nechama on from NY 08/30 at 04:40 PMI’m also skeptical of the NYT with stories like that, but your point is well-taken, Nechama. I guess you could always get a gig in rural Africa and your cell will work like a charm.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 08/30 at 06:08 PMI share the prevailing skepticism about reception, but I hasten to point out that these are people *reinforcing* relationships in very difficult circumstances. Teenagers texting “w007” and the like to their friends aren’t doing any such thing. They are communicating in this way by choice to people they have (in the example cited) easy RL access to. I see a big difference.
Posted by Ned Ludd's Bud Richard on from 08/31 at 01:51 PM
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