OBLIVIAN:

The advance of technology is sort of like “better living through chemistry,” which brought us bottled drinking water. Don’t get me wrong. I love hot showers, refrigeration and those plug-in timers that turn my lights on and off. Those things make me feel like I’m in a Jetsons episode. That, and the fact that my computer is my best friend, I have video conversations, read news on a screen and run on a treadmill. I do not, however, have an anti-gravity switch, a flying car nor a personal jet pack, and I kind of resent this.

I blame the Consumer Electronics Show in keeping with my victim’s mentality. I also believe the event to be a massive conspiracy to distract us from the fact that we are not yet zipping about over the city in flying Volkswagen Bugs. I understand this year’s CES extravaganza was rife with smart TVs, tablet computers and displays you can view from the side. Yawn.

I would have gone to Las Vegas to yawn at the show in person had the consumer electronics industry bothered to create teleportation, but no. They give us smart TVs and smartphones. I’m here to tell you today that this is not a particularly good omen for dumb people. If any of you other dumb people out there are interested in joining me in forming a lobby to buy off Congress protect our rights, just leave an anonymous, unintelligible comment below. I have seen you there before. I know we are legion.

I considered driving my ground-hugging Hello Kitty Interceptor to the show in Vegas, but my travel budget consists of the loose change in the ashtray. When I just have to get away, I use it to plug parking meters in a part of town where hat stores serve free champagne when you feign interest in buying a hat. But that, too, is getting harder to do, thanks to technology.

Meters are being replaced by some crazy automated valet thing that takes plastic and bills and spits out a receipt for the dash but no change, thank you very much. So you have to spend an entire dollar, first of all, and second, it completely bollixes running out of the store after a couple of flutes with the excuse of plugging the meter. How is this making my life easier, I ask you?

I don’t remember the city asking approval for a new hidden tax in the form of parking extortion. Now, rather than the occasional meter sprint, we now have groups of people surrounding these kiosks like monkeys poking the obelisk in “2001.”  I blame the consumer electronics industry for this, too, because if I had a jet pack like I’m supposed to by now, I wouldn’t have to park anywhere, now, would I. (*rolls eyes*)

Yo. Consumer electronics industry–I really do belong on your market research panel. Smart gear is so tomorrow morning. Is it really that hard to fabricate a multi-location generator so that I can simultaneously work and practice meditation–or as some call it, “sleep?” I would also like to have a handheld morpher so I can transform into a werewolf for a split second when some snarky salesperson asks if I’m going to buy that hat or just guzzle the Mumm’s. I would like to have a pyrokinesis chip implant for similar purposes.

Instead, you give me a new crop of TVs that connect to the Internet, but not completely because that’s how the TV makers intend to compete–by giving me only the stuff they want me to have. News flash: You are treading precariously close to fomenting a Smart TV Neutrality movement, not to mention provoking the wrath of the Dumb Individuals Protection Society. And once DIPS wake up, there’s not telling what they might do besides run for office and work as journalists.

EVERYWHERE, MAN:

And no, he is not scribbling a treatise against the U.S. government, collecting guns and ammo, or hoarding drinking water and Slim Jims. One thing he does is chide me when he doesn’t hear from me for a while.

Me: “You’d know I called if you got an answering machine like the rest of us did 30 years ago.”

Him, growling: “You know I’ll never get one of those.”

Me: “How do you avoid talking to people who call you because you’d rather someone else would call?”

Him, more like a snarl: “I say, ‘what do you want?’”

And then he busts out laughing because he thinks its funny to confuse others who adapt along with modern culture and have no way of knowing he’s not a deranged whack  job. Personally, I’m not so sure, but I look around at those of us who did adapt and I’m not so sure modern culture hasn’t swan dived off the sane train.

Segways, for example. I think they speak for themselves. Traffic. Why are we still driving? I don’t get that one at all. A majority of the 1,200 people remaining in the workforce use computers at home and then drive someplace to use a computer for work. I don’t, actually, and I do miss talking to other people when I want to say something to the effect of, “I’m going to stuff this @#*&! % computer into a wood chipper!!!”

This is the computer—or rather the eighth or ninth one—that was going to make my life easier and give me freedom theretofore unimagined. Now I am a slave to the thing as surely as if it had me on a tractor beam. I feel like Neo in Matrix when he’s in that dentist chair with the big fire hose on his cerebellum.

I bring up the computers first thing in the morning when I get up. I always have this vague intention of getting through an entire round of Vipassana beforehand so I can still turn my head when I’m 52, but it’s over there… the portal… calling to me, taunting me. “Stuff you don’t know happened. Stuff you don’t know happened.” And then I have to go find out that Ultabooks will be hot at CES, Van Halen is making a comeback, stocks are mixed, iPhones gobble data, some sporting event happened, a celebrity got drunk and married a panda, and a study by young researchers indicates memory starts failing at 45. As if that’s a bad thing. Why doesn’t someone invest in research on the best way to obliterate memories? I have a few pesky ones I’d give up, I can tell you that right now.

The 2012 campaign year will not be one of them because I have already developed a mental filter for it. Anytime I see or hear anything related to the GOP race, a sort of white noise buffers my awareness like the warm blankey of pathological denial in the face of impending apocalypse. Half the time, I’d swear The Onion is orchestrating the whole thing, but even The Onion is not that absurd.

“You’ve got to get back out here in the country,” says the man with one TV channel and wild turkeys grazing within six feet of his front door. “You’ve been in the city too long.”

“Where’s the closest place to get Panang tofu?”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“Do they have a nail salon, yet?”

“It may be too late for you already.”

“Oh, don’t be silly. I’d be fine out there, as long as I could get broadband and the occasional hot stone massage. Does anyone do hot stone massages?”

“I want you to listen very closely. When I hang up, I want you to call 911 and tell them you may have had a stroke.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear that. I was getting a text. My girlfriend Oksana got a new ringtone and she wants me to call so she can hear it. You were saying?

… Hello?

…Hello?”

STRANGER THAN FICTION:

Winning!

Here’s my basic position on piracy: Pirates in general are criminal blackguards who should be avoided unless they have rum and look like Johnny Depp. As for online piracy, therein lay a contradiction. People who make movies, music and literature enjoy being paid for it. People who watch movies, listen to music and read books online prefer doing so for free, and by “prefer” I mean, deem it their unalienable right.

The impact is painfully obvious here in Hollywood where people whose retirement consisted of acting residuals are now seeking second careers making change. Part of that is the way studios structure distribution deals, of course, but at the core of it is the digital depreciation of content.

Exhibit A) I have a friend who makes a very healthy six-figure salary who once burned a CD for me (back when we did such things) and called it Fair Use, though it seemed curiously parallel to “cheap.” Now that physical media is all but dead, everything’s online. We just won’t pay–much at least–for online content, and advertisers are not all that keen on the click.

And so ensues a screaming match in Washington, D.C. about SOPA between the Hollywood lobby and the electronics lobby whose members benefit like crazy from free content. Without it, our handheld computer portals become even greater money sinks than they already are.

The fight assumes SOPA would actually have any impact whatsoever on Internet piracy. The general idea of being a pirate is to break the law, so it seems that a law against online piracy technically creates piracy. You do that, and you have to pay for a cybernavy, and to pay for a cybernavy, you have to have a sufficient tax base, and I guess we all know show that’s working out.

Enforcement is therefore left up to Internet Service Providers in the form of blocking offending domain names and an IP addresses. That’s certainly impossible for any moderately web-savvy six-year-old to work around. What the SOPA debate does, if anything, is amplify the chasmic disconnect between technology and legislation.

An exchange during the House hearing on SOPA suggest the time is right for hackers to start running for office. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) tweeted at one point that he was so bored with the testimony of one of his colleagues, that he was “killing time by surfing the Internet.” Congressman King apparently had never heard of Anthony Weiner, and therefore supposed said colleague would not hear of his tweet, which she did. Consequently, the hearing on legislation to outlaw online piracy turned into a spatfest between alleged adults, in other words, a typical hearing on Capitol Hill.

Rather than turn to legislators to reign in content piracy, perhaps the Hollywood lobby would be better off just hiring up a few boatloads of pirates. Making a law against digital piracy is up there with a beat cop telling the guy selling knock-off watches in Times Square to move along. And for the pirates, there has to be a better way than completely decimating the industries from which they’re purloining. Or not, and then what happens to the economies based on those industries?

I truly doubt whether SOPA itself is the right answer, but the spirit of SOPA may very well may be the preservation of jobs. Opponents will howl that the Internet creates jobs galore, but in the case of online piracy, that appears to be a handful of jobs in Hong Kong and Sweden versus a few hundred thousand in the U.S. content creation industry.

One way to overcome the whole mess is for people to stop consuming pirated content. So I guess we’d better think of something else.
~ Deborah D. McAdams

McAdams On: App-rehension
SKEPTICITY:

I realize how frightfully this sets me apart. I was at a dinner party recently with 500 of my closest strangers, and the two people seated next to me talked about apps throughout the entire meal. They tried to draw me into the conversation, bless ’em, but I just sat there like a stunned monkey, nodding my head and smiling. It’s true that I couldn’t hear anything amid the din of 500 people talking at once, but it may have been worse had I tried to comment. I’d have said something along the lines of, “oh, that’s really cool.” I say that when I have no idea what’s going on. I say it a lot. I should just get it printed on a t-shirt and point to it.

Apps are, after all, the new cable TV. There was a time cable executives couldn’t stop with the anecdote about people subsisting on dog chews rather than risk losing cable TV. Now, no one cares about cable TV because there’s an app for it. There’s an app for everything, except one that earns a paycheck for me while I run on the beach–the new iKlone™ ®©–“for when you absolutely, positively have to do something else besides work for a living.”

I’m not in complete darkness about apps, because there is always someone in my circle breathlessly showing me their latest acquisition. One friend was absolutely dazzled with the flashlight app that made his eleventy-hundred dollar smartphone screen glow white. (Me: Stunned monkey look.) There was one purporting an indiscernible frequency to keep insects away, when you can find one whose genes have survived the L.A. smog. There’s an app for locating your car. I can see needing that one very, very soon. First the hearing goes, then the… whatever it is…

There’s apps for identifying musical refrains, alerting you the dry cleaners is nearby, remembering your passwords, keeping track of one’s alcohol intake and translating Spanish to English in photographs. In other words, there’s an app for everything we once did with our minds, so that we may slip ever sooner into senility and appear not to! We are becoming ever more dependent on machines to do our thinking for us. That can’t be good, but I’m not sure, so I’ll Google it later.

Even the practice of telecommuting is robbing us of the opportunity to keep forgetting things we had to take to work and other stuff we wanted to take home. The one advantage in that regard is that you can still hide things from yourself in your own home office. This is easily achieved by putting something where you won’t forget it. Works every time. As soon as there’s an app for finding all that stuff, however, I fear all is lost. Civilization will collapse like a flan in a cupboard.

I would be more concerned for life as we know it had I sufficient cognizance, for one thing, and if these type of memory aid apps were all the rage. This does not seem to be the case, however. According to the Apple app store, people are using this most amazing of technologies to play. Bubble Shooter Free is No. 4 on the top 10 list of most popular apps in the iTunes store. Bubble Shooter Free is a game where you shoot bubbles. In my day, we called it “Space Invaders” and played it on refurbished pinball machines, so I can see in this instance where technology has magnificently revolutionized human life. “Ragdoll Blasters 2,” which looks suspiciously like Mario Bros., is No. 1. (Oh, I can feel the flames now for that comparison…) Then there’s StickWars, NudeRunner-Girl Edition, a Fibonacci sequencer and a dark matter generator.

No there’s not. There’s nothing among the top 10 apps of five first world nations that belies anything but shear mindlessness and some degree of digital dexterity. And since I can already button my shirts and tie my own shoes, I cannot quite work myself into any sense of urgency about missing out. I was never much of a dinner conversationalist anyway, and I have stunned monkey down pat. O_o

So there you go.

ROPES:

Now it may seem only fair that there’s no white space carve-out for unlicensed devices in the radically reduced TV band. TV signals are federally protected from interference, after all, as long as long as the source of the interference can be found. However, unless some enterprising broadcast engineer writes an app for tracking unlicensed devices, they’ll be pretty much elusive. They are supposed to be able to avoid occupied frequencies by checking a database, which–after all the TV channels in the townhouse are squeezed into a Coleman tent–will be accurate in the year 2212.

All right, it might all work. Seriously. I’m probably just being cynical, and the TV band will not become the Mardi Gras radio frequency noise, effectively knocking the industry out of existence once and for all. Because Verizon already has an app for that!

Our wacky clever friends at the company that doesn’t need no stinkin’ customer service department because they own you has gone and eloped with the biggest cable operators in the country. Verizon Wireless today bought out the spectrum that Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House were not squatting on for $3.6 billion, netting the cable operators a 60 percent return for holding onto it and doing nothing with it but not squatting since 2006.

The deal sprouts multiple roses for Verizon. On one hand, it appears to drive up the price of spectrum just as legislators are considering how much they can sell so they can use that money to buy more special favors for their special friends. (Note: If you are occupying anyplace at all in a Coleman tent, you are probably not one of these.) The deal provides that much more ammunition for the Administration’s efforts to hand the TV spectrum over to the super carriers who–and let me be clear here–will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give America’s spectrum back no matter what but they will secure massive taxpayer subsidies in order to provide service to taxpayers. Touché, indeed.

This leviathan polygamy (and I mean that with all due respect) also includes co-marketing arrangements whereby Verizon peddles cable TV service and the cablers sell Verizon Wireless service—eventually in a bundle. Hello, mobile DTV folks? Goodbye, mobile DTV. Bring the brickbats, but we all know mobile DTV could have should have been up and running in the commercial space by now, and would have been if not for all the usual factionalizing that characterizes the industry. If this isn’t a unifying call to arms, I don’t know what is. Comcast, TWC and Brighthouse together have 37 million video subscribers. Verizon has more than 94 million wireless subscribers. Together, they have the power, infrastructure and ability to deploy their own flavor of mobile television to millions of people in a matter of months, with deeply discounted devices on two-year contracts.

Mobile DTV, we hardly knew ye.
~ Deborah D. McAdams

BRINKSVILLE: 

I understand the cellphone industry is supposed to have a universal micro-USB interface by January. It will be delivered by magic earth faeries riding glitter-breathing unicorns. Even if this somehow actually occurs, there are already 160 gazillion dead cellphones and power cords in the environment. Only if they are discovered to assist in weight loss and reverse aging will they not end up in landfills wrapped in banana peels.

Seriously. Have the garbage police ever knocked on your door with a handful of slime-covered batteries? You’re probably more familiar with the Radio Shack relay, whereby you are told that Radio Shack recycles batteries, but just “not this one. Maybe the one over on Manchester.” Then the first Shack team calls the one on Manchester and places bets on how many locations you’ll hit before going home and sticking your sack of dead batteries back under the counter next to obsolete cellphone cords.

My cellphone service provider offers me a new device every two years–either free or at a deep discount that they recoup the first month with an astoundingly pricey new contract. I shall forever regret giving up my Nokia brick. You could actually hear what a caller was saying on the brick, but the Razr came in pink. Why I gave up my pink Moto Razr, I’ll never know. Most of my phones since then have been unmemorable. I have two cellphones on my desk right now, one for which I have to grasp the skid of a passing helicopter to get a signal. The other one makes callers sound like they are talking over shortwave radio. I have yet to adopt a “smartphone” because A) they’re a ploy to make me pay three times what I do now for a service plan, and B) I see my friends with smartphones yelling into them because that’s what you do with a dropped signal, or two cans on a string.

The notion of “green” products of any kind is a bit of a crock because everything from toothpaste to memory cards come wrapped in packaging that volumetrically exceeds the thing you’re buying. Electronics components typically come in hermetically sealed, nuclear-proof, plastic armor that requires a table saw to open. Like that stuff will ever break down within the lifetime of the planet.

If the electronics industry really wanted to be green, it would build things to last much longer, though I understand cyclical replacement is an obscenely massive profit center. It might not be so huge if the industry had to recycle everything it sells under controlled conditions rather than allow the stuff to be exported and turned into lead charm bracelets for kids. Certainly our cellphones have reached some sort of form factor upgradable with new chips, which in turn could be recycled here to create jobs

Yes, it would make the devices more expensive, but everything gets more expensive. The idea of being “green” is about cognizance of one’s impact on the environment. Nothing wakes us up like a hefty price tag. If we’re not willing to pay for it, and industry’s not willing to push it, then fine. But let’s at least stop pretending that anything but money is green.

AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: What I am about to describe is the true story of how phone companies are taking over the United States of America. If I am never seen or heard from again, tell my mother I love her, just not over the phone.

Once upon a time, making a phone call once involved the use of a toaster-sized static device roped to a wall outlet. There were areas of the country where calls were connected by local ladies who, it is now clear, were operatives of The CIA. If you were not in the vicinity of the toaster-sized device when someone tried to call you, the only way to know is if you were so informed by the caller or the phone company spy lady.

Consequently, there were no repetitive cha-chas spontaneously playing in every eating establishment across the country, and there was no “looming spectrum crisis.” One could go outside and just see the spectrum enjoying itself. Now it looms about, dragging a rucksack of cha-chas, doorbells, jingles and electronic barks, chirps and quacks. There are more cell phone sounds than human beings in the United States, or at least in my house.

We’ve all been convinced through the miracle of advertising that we must be “connected.” Those without connectivity are looked upon with suspicion, even though connectivity hath yielded zombie hordes walking down the street with their noses stuck to three-inch screens. This phenomenon is considered innovation, however, and we must prostrate ourselves before it or be accused of murder! For to resist “innovative” technology is to be considered “job-killing,” even as thousands of former phone spies were displaced by innovation. Or so it seems. Several thousand were reassigned to the retail network known as “Walmart” where they keep track of what we buy.

What they discovered is that not only does America buy more stuff than it makes, it makes more stuff than ever without the help of Americans. How can this be, you may wonder, or maybe not. Because if you’re still employed, you’re doing the jobs of two or three people the only way one person can–kind of–and with the help of your trusty smartphone. Things that once looked like toasters with tethered handsets are now tiny newsgathering, broadcasting, communications, homing devices. And if they are the new iPhone, they are also your own personal Geeves named “Siri” because Geeves is not innovative.

Siri, as every connected individual now knows, is the voice-activated robot helper in the iPhone IVs, quasi-secretly keeping track of your every move by asking you what you want. “Siri, find Belgian blonde on tap,” you might say, for example, whereupon Siri replies, “Sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network… *hic* Sorry, I’m having trouble connecting to the network… Sorry…”

When Siri works, which I guess it does sometimes, it reaches through the parent company’s database into the cloud and comes back with Dutch-speaking dance teachers.  Ha ha, not really. That is called “Google.” Siri apparently works so well that users overwhelmed Apple’s servers with it yesterday. It seems Sirians caught wind of some news from smart people that robots can now practice law as effectively as lawyers, and by proxy, lawmakers.

Reports now are emerging–here, for example–that the Siri crowd simultaneously requested that the electronic assistant run for office. Siri, whose intelligence may be artificial, is no dummy. She put a stop to that nonsense tout de suite. The good news, however, is the resulting development of a voice-activated assistant of questionable intelligence, without a single scruple on its chipset, designed to take the place of human beings in Congress. This innovative technology is expected to become available before the next election cycle in select Walmart locations staffed by nondescript ladies who will innocently inquire, “Oh, are you going to going to send a robot to Congress?”

And there you go.
~ Deborah D. McAdams

HERE: 

IT people live in a world of their own. Generally one under low lights and refrigeration. They seem to view the rest of us much the way early H. sapiens considered Mr. and Mrs. Neanderthal. Except in our case, ITs make the tools and we unITs use them. It sometimes seems that never the twain shall meet.

The primary problem with the IT/unIT schism is that each really has no idea what the other does. We only know we annoy one another. And that we unITs rely upon the ITs to do our jobs. When the systems fail, they tell us to file a ticket. When the biggest story of the month falls into your lap and you’re on deadline, the last thing you want to hear is “fill out a ticket.” You just want the software to work like it’s supposed to.

(I wish to interject here that I understand why the IT folks have the ticket system. The job is a bit like running a daycare center. At any given moment, there are 25 other people in the company with a computer emergency that must be resolved this instant! And some of those folks, even after having been asked the same question right off the bat in 32 previous incidents, have apparently not emptied their cache. Using a computer is a bit like driving a car–it never hurts to have minimal knowledge of how the thing works and how to repair it. But some of us can’t be bothered and that’s why the rest of us have to take a number. Thanks a lot.)

Getting back to the aforementioned cultural divide, ITs are accustomed to software failures and respond methodically, while the rest of us spontaneously combust. This is particularly true in media companies, where news is our core product. It is called “news” because it is “new.” In the wonderful world of online journalism, new constitutes approximately seven seconds or less. However, consumption duration is measured in minutes, so if you have momentary site failure, traffic generally recovers.

Ten minutes of down time on a TV station is a different story. That’s more than plenty of time for the audience to become fully engaged in something else. Like another TV station. Depending on the size of the station affected, that could be a few million bucks down the drain.

We unITs are often accused of resisting new technology or worse yet, change. Give me a break. Most media people I know move at least half-dozen times throughout their career, and anyone in the business for even 10 years has learned multiple software systems and mastered innumerable handheld devices. We are neither change- nor technology resistant. What we are averse to is stuff that doesn’t work, or takes five times longer to do the same thing as the stuff we used to use. That’s what we’re resistant to, not change or technology.

There’s a very simple remedy, and it involves the people creating and installing the tools shadowing those who use them. The technology and software used in newsrooms should be intuitive, reliable, and essentially invisible. Writers should be writing and editors should be editing. None of them should be coding, tagging, prioritizing, formatting and scheduling material, then waiting to see what actually comes out the other end.

Let’s communicate, people. unITs get better tools, ITs get fewer tickets, and incidents of spontaneous combustion drastically decline.
~ Deborah D. McAdams

NOT WALL STREET:

Contrary to popular belief and substantial evidence otherwise, journalism majors are generally very smart people, yours truly notwithstanding. My school required at least one other major or two minors in addition to journalism. That’s because journalists have to comprehend everything they encounter and boil it down to 500 or fewer words. “Welcome to the Grass Valley Union. Please give us an update on the county’s failed municipal bond. Don’t expect overtime.” However, the beauty of journalism, practiced traditionally, is the opportunity to learn from experts. I doubt that bond attorneys would have jumped at the chance to answer my calls when I was a farm wife.

But I digress, like I do after 5:30 a.m. phone calls with remarkably optimistic engineers who believe I will eventually grasp what they are saying. It must be like when the rest of us are talking to a dog.

So journalism school, yes. There’s this thing about objectivity, and the diligent guardianship thereof. Consequently, though one is driving a oil-burning Ford F-150 and dividing ketchup packets for soup, one must not accept the dazzling array of gifts and electronics and sandwiches one is offered. OK, fine. One is not so materialistic in the first place, so one will live.

But one is also not supposed to act on or express political or personal opinions. Seriously. They taught us that. There was even an open-ended question as to whether we should even vote, as if journalism were a felony. The main point was to constantly monitor our objectivity. E.g., It’s probably not a problem to vote if I’m writing the obits. Not so much if I’ve got the White House beat.

The problem, however, with self-monitoring is that the capacity for rationalization varies wildly among individuals. I think every person alive has stepped over the line of integrity. Some may recognize it and discover it’s not worth the violation of their conscience. Others may justify and bury it; others still may feel pretty smart for “getting by” with something. That’s just the spectrum of human nature.

That’s why lines are drawn, and why it’s important for journalists and readers to identify the difference between reporting and opinion. I know I dance on both sides of that line quite a bit. I would argue that the Internet is quite a different animal to feed, but that would be a cop out. Sometimes I just can’t help but throw my two cents in, and trust that it’s obvious.

Not that anyone appreciates that or cares. My apologies in that respect. Sometimes its a coping mechanism, as I imagine it was for Jamie Wilson, the KPTV-TV Fox 12 reporter crossing through the innertubes this week for telling Occupy Portland protesters, “I am one of you,” while the cameras rolled.

“I have student loans, I can’t get out of debt, I have a ridiculously high-priced college education, and my real-world job has not given me the salary to pay it off. I became a young homeowner, because it was a dream, and now my home has tanked in value, and I’m still behind on the mortgage . . . I feel your pain.”

I haven’t come across anything about how Jamie’s news director reacted to her rant, which is now posted on YouTube. I was entertained and informed. Cable networks have made a killing in opinion journalism with so-called “talking heads” paid exorbitant salaries. Maybe there’s a place in local news for the “candid reporter.”

Few businesses are as opaque as news organizations. Maybe there’s a place for transparency alongside objectivity. I know I’d like to hear what news people are really thinking. I already have a handle on the weather.
~ Deborah D. McAdams

Anyone who’s used a computer for more than 15 years will certainly recall that Apple made them right-brain friendly. Steve Jobs is in good part responsible for why we don’t have to know a programming language to use a computer. That alone is reason enough to deify the guy in my book. Even the non-computer science major could fix software conflicts and handily reload the operating system on the early Macs. Those things were a wonder, and they made Bill Gates moderately less condescending toward his company’s customers. Touché, again.

Schools adopted Macs in part because they facilitated right-brain creativity, and because the company had the sense to do deals with colleges and universities. You learn on a Mac, buy one on discount as a student, you probably become a loyal Mac user. Good strategy. I bought a Power Mac 8500 with my Hearst scholarship money. I wrote, designed and typeset a book on it. “The Grain Way, A History of the Nebraska Grain and Feed Association.” A mega-seller. I only work now because I enjoy the headaches.

(Digression alert: I was in my 20s before I started using computers, and in my 30s when I graduated from college. I have to wonder what my life would be like now if I’d had a computer and the Internet when I was a kid trapped on a farm in the Sand Hills. It’s a perspective that informs my support of nationwide broadband availability, though I believe the current call to reassign broadcast TV spectrum to provide it disingenuously claims the interest of the unserved when in fact it is about controlling content delivery in metropolitan areas.)

Back to the subject at hand; I’m guessing most of us by now are Mac and Microsoft literate. I have one of each setting on my desk. There’s a Powerbook 190CS, upon which I once published a newspaper, in my closet. There’s also a Zip drive, a dial-up modem, a selection of modem cards, diskettes galore and enough cable to plug into an outlet in Guam. Which all serves to bring me back to my original intent, that is, to question the legacy of Mr. Jobs.

It became clear as my collection of obsolete computer gear multiplied like bunnies that personal technology could easily become a very expensive addiction, both for me and for the environment. This stuff is not exactly on par with the cup holders from Starbucks. I wasn’t thinking back in the ’90s that women in China would one day be cooking down motherboards and sucking in the toxic fumes because of my particular hardware-buying habits. I doubt that crossed the minds of all the people who lined up for iPhones in June of 2007. I doubt too many Americans think about it now when they flip their perfectly good iPhone for the newest iPhone. Upgrading our cellphones is such an accepted obsession that not doing so is considered suspect. When I tell people I don’t have a smartphone, I may as well be saying I obtain my food with a club.

Mr. Jobs to some degree is responsible for “innovation” becoming synonymous with “versions.” While Apple’s successive software and hardware versions were not immune to criticisms, their impact beyond the user experience was seldom questioned. It’s long been clear that “versions” have little or no relationship to necessity and everything to do with boosting stock prices. Mr. Jobs relished that part of the game just as certainly as his competitors. And we’re all pretty much OK with that, too, as long as it’s befouling someone else’s drinking water.

I understand that rampant consumption drives the wheels upon which the American economy turns, and I like new stuff just as much as the next person. But at what cost? When will the meaning of “innovation” evolve beyond the mindset of versions and throw-away technology? Who will give us the virtually upgradeable modular device set designed for the human lifespan, or at least a lot more of it than 10 months?

We don’t need the next Steve Jobs. I think the late Mr. Jobs, may he rest in peace, would even agree that what we need isn’t the next him. What we need is the original, creative and big-picture thinker who takes us far beyond anything Mr. Jobs conceived of.

We need someone who will redefine what it is to innovate.
~ Deborah D. McAdams