M’s the Word: Connecting through technology

How I learned to love the Kindle...



I think you know that I not exactly an anorak-wearing technologist.

I cannot see any reason for an iPad. My iPod is a shiny green square with a circle on it, filled with songs a friend loaded for me. (I have no idea how; I am just grateful that the playlist includes so many of my favourite songs.)

But I have bought a Kindle, and I think I am addicted.

I have loaded my daily newspaper, my weekly newspaper, and I have read three books, and I have only owned it for a week. Which sets me thinking...

There is a limit to the amount of time in a day, so something has suffered. What am I doing less? 

One of the first articles I read was about the demise of the Sony interactive website.

This really was an anorak site, but it had over 70 million subscribers.

It did not make money for Sony, but it seems it served an important purpose.

The players were connectected to each other. They may never have met. They just connected over the ether, connected across countries and continents, millions of young people with networks of friends, playing games together.

I am undecided about the reality of these friends, but I cannot deny that there is now a vacuum in the lives of those players.

I could argue that the connection kept them off the streets, and perhaps reduced the amount of malice or negative behavior. It may have provided a social network, a social safety net, for hundreds of thousands of otherwise footloose potential hooligans.

And I wonder what they are doing instead. Have they turned to social media like Twitter or Facebook? Or are they out on the streets, blinking in the light, contemplating some more sinister displacement activity.

I have always held the belief that most new technologies are driving us inside our heads.

They are creating opportunities to reduce our movements to mouse clicks or digital epilepsy.

They reduce our input to a two-dimensional array of visualizations, interpretations of the world that are getting ever more life-LIKE but are not life.

They replace life. The reality they create is less and less LIFE-like.

This replication of life can now be air-brushed to remove imperfections or designed completely, with only the most rudimentary skeleton from reality.

Am I finally being lured into this un-reality, as I read the news on an electronic screen? Has my interaction with the real world been the casualty?

Actually, no. I have stopped watching television. I have not worked out how to delete things from the Kindle, so I am preserving information that I can refer to again.

I am somehow more reflective now. I have reduced the speed with which images pass in front of my eyes, and I am absorbing more of the detail.

I can rewind, check, savor, and replay.

The only problem I have is, I want my wife to be able to read the books I have enjoyed, which means either I have to go out and buy the paper copies or I have to buy her a Kindle, too...

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