or: It’s Just a Phone
The MacPsych blog has an interesting post about mobile phones, on the occasion of the latest Apple “event” introducing new iPhoniana. They say:
“I have read lots of differing perspective online, from fanboy exclamations of ‘the best phone everrrrrr!’ through to the much more realistic ‘it’s just a fucking phone’.
As time passes, I find myself moving much more towards to the latter perspective.”
There’s a fair amount of discussion about this online. Lee Peterson agrees:
“It’s just a phone – mine needs to take nice pictures, keep me in contact with friends and families, help me stay on track with things I need to do and be an audio player.“
Matt Birchler is also in the loop, and widens the issue to something more interesting to me:
“Everyone’s got hobbies and those hobbies make them care and spend money on things that other people go, ‘what’s so exciting, it’s just an XYZ?’”
I’m cautious about anything ascribed to “everyone,” but it’s certainly true that a great many people do have hobbies they’re passionate about. But the connection with “spending money,” and by implication, the connection with products, seems to me to miss the mark. I’ve thought about whether there are any products that I’m really passionate about.
I use computers a lot, and while I appreciate a good keyboard, I am not a “keyboard guy.” But there is a whole keyboard community out there. I enjoy using a nice pen, but for me “nice pen” really means “works very reliably and is a little bit thicker and easier to hold than a Bic ballpoint.” I mean, I enjoyed Wes Anderson’s short film advertising Mont Blanc pens, but I have no interest in pens as anything more than a utility.
This may be a character flaw; with a brief digression as a boy into amassing and labeling various mineral samples, I’m just not a collector. Whatever it is that so many people find makes them happy about owning specific (sometimes very specific) things, I just don’t have it. At a pretty deep level, I don’t really even understand it. I do accept it though, and what I can appreciate is the happiness someone might get from having, say, a warehouse full of cars.
I think passions for products are likely to be consequences of the world we live in. From birth we see, hear, and eventually read persuasive messages telling us what we are supposed to want, supposed to like, expected to spend money on. I haven’t “watched television” in many years, but as a child of the 1960s I grew up with it. My favorite shows were regularly interrupted by messages urging consumption, purchasing, wanting. Or maybe I should say those messages were regularly interrupted by my favorite shows.
The messages certainly worked on my just as much as anybody; as a kid I looked forward to Christmas morning as a glorious, acquisitive event. It was only later that I began to lose that hunger for more and better things.
Not that I’ve become some sort of ascetic, hermetic monk, of course. I still have lots of stuff. But I’ve generally stepped away from acquiring more, unless there is a think I need in order to do something I need or want to do. Right now I’m using a very nice MacBook Air (that came with a perfectly good keyboard), but while it’s a nice example of a tool mass produced in the thousands (or more) by a factory somewhere, I can’t find in myself any passion for the object itself. It does what I need very well, it’s easy to carry, convenient to use, and the battery lasts more than all day. I can’t think of anything I wish it did that it doesn’t. But I can imagine finding something like that, and if I do, I’d be perfectly comfortable moving on to an even more suitable mass-produced product.
The first portable computer I ever used was a Tandy Model 100, decades ago. It was not very useful for the things I do with the MacBook, but decades ago most of those things didn’t yet exist. The Model 100 had a decent keyboard, was easy to carry, convenient to use, and the batteries (standard AA cells) lasted all week. Some people are passionate about vintage computers like the Model 100. I have fond memories of that particular mass-produced product, but for whatever reason I have no interest in using one again. I’m not even sure what it could be used for now. I think it had a modem you could use with your telephone land line — but I don’t have a land line any more either.
What is it about memory and nostalgia and longing that connect them so strongly, for some, to the desires for acquisition we are all so forcefully taught? I like to think it might be the same impulse that I find drives a passion I do have: for beautiful written expression. I suppose I collect such expressions, in a way (although not by owning lots of books). I have the good fortune to be able to remember such expressions. Writing like this is my personal passion:
“Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.
“Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn’t. Like many fly fisherman in western Montana, where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
