Enough With The 21st Century

Traveling to Austin, Texas, and back last weekend via four plane rides, I was struck by how many people own iPhones, Blackberries or some other PDA. They constantly checked and fiddled with them in the airport and on planes, even when, to form superficial judgments, they looked like the type of people who really had no need for one.

Is there really a need to be plugged into an electronic device all the time? When we're sitting and waiting, killing time, do we need to be updating someone else on this or learning what someone else is doing? Obviously, consumption inherently connotes status and the type of products two people have create class hierarchy: What do you think of someone who owns an iPhone versus a Verizon flip cell phone? A Kate Spade bag versus one by Marc Jacobs? But the practical reason for owning a smartphone -- staying connected to the network so you can remain productive while traveling -- has been supplanted by the image of work -- looking busily at a small portable screen only to use it for emphemera such as crossword puzzles and text messages. Signifier trumps substance yet again.

The most striking thing is how we've forgotten how to be alone. (Yes, Jonathan Franzen's oeuvre rears its head again in these pages.) The concept of placing a device in our pocket and opening a magazine or book -- any magazine or book, for that matter; not even something pretentiously ponderous -- is foreign. Leave the rest of the infinte (cyber)world alone for two hours and see what exists in between the (in)finite space of your temples and the covers of a book. At the heart of this problem is a lack of interest in challenging our mental capacity and, instead, settling for the vapidity of our iPhone's applications.

Update: Malcolm Gladwell, in his mildly odd recent story in the New Yorker, about applying the principles of militant insurgency to success in everyday life, has a side note about how the 21st century is defined by "real-time processing," aka receiving a constant stream of conglomerated data to make decisions instantaneously. Everything before it was "batch," aka collecting information over the course of X period of time and waiting to make a decision. The story centers around a Little League girls' basketball coach, who also happens to be a Silicon Valley executive, who argues the Federal Reserve should take a real-time approach to setting monetary policy. I think there's something to be said for "batch" thinking more often than not. Obviously, someone who's made lots of money from a book about the advantages of making quick decisions disagrees.