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"I bring you gladsome tidings," Julie told me in a late afternoon phone call. "Our Verizon contract expired in September."
Meaning, of course, that we were now free to buy iPhones. Which I did, on the way home from work today. Two of them. Beautiful things. Tell me which apps I need. Which are your favorites, and why?
At lunch just now here at the St. James House, Shelley, a reader of this blog, mentioned that she didn't understand why anybody would want to trade in an old-technology book for the Kindle. I've seen the Kindle, and I completely agree. It's not that the Kindle is in principle a bad idea, at least not to me; it's that the page is hard to read. If the Kindle offered type in a crisp black and white instead of shades of gray, I'd be willing to reconsider. But to me, nothing can match the reading ease and pleasure of standard ink on paper.
Writing a long essay about the Kindle in the New Yorker, Nicholson Baker comes to more or less the same conclusion. And he has a suggestion for people who want to read books on electronic devices:
Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn't so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there's another way to go. Here's what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle's price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free "Kindle for iPod" application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 A.M. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don't want to wake up the person who's in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple's smooth machine and click it on. It's completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen's brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear. After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead. You will roll to a stop. A moment later, you'll wake and discover that you're still holding the machine but it has turned itself off. Slide it back under the pillow. Sleep.I've done this with Joseph Mitchell's "The Bottom of the Harbor" ($13.80 Kindle, $17.25 paperback) and with Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone." The iPod screen's resolution, at a hundred and sixty-three pixels per inch, is fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not a reflective surface, is, I've come to believe, what people need when they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace. There's also the Iceberg Reader, by ScrollMotion, with fixed page numbers, and a very popular app called Stanza. In Stanza, you can choose the colors of the words and of the page, and you can adjust the brightness with a vertical thumb swipe as you read. Stanza takes you to Harlequin Imprints, the Fictionwise Book Store, O'Reilly Ebooks, Feedbooks, and a number of other catalogues. A million people have downloaded Stanza. (In fact, Stanza is so good that Amazon has just bought Lexcycle, which makes the software; meanwhile, Fictionwise has been bought by a worried Barnes & Noble.)
Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren't reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it's beautiful, and (b) it's not imitating anything. It's not trying to be ink on paper. It serves a night-reading need, which the lightless Kindle doesn't.
Sooner or later, somebody's going to get the e-book right, and I'll buy it. But not just yet.
Look, I love that the Iranian masses are using technology to thwart their corrupt and wicked regime. But I think we had better not make the old mistake that just because younger Iranians are fed up with their government and are using technology to undermine it, that a better world (or even a better Iran, from the US point of view) is only a tweet or two away. I believe it was philosopher John Gray who reminded us in Cambridge that the French Positivists believed that canals would link the world and bring about a universal civilization and world peace. Today it's the Internet and related technologies. Here's Gray, from an essay on novelist Joseph Conrad:
The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge -- not even in the long run....The realistic prospect is that the most we can do is stave off disaster, a task that demands stoicism and fortitude, not the utopian imagination.
We would be fools to think that if the brave Iranian crowds on the streets of Tehran today get what they want, that they'll somehow become gosh, just like us Americans. Or that they'll give up their nuclear program, and cease to be a threat to the region, to Israel, or the US interests. I think Obama gets that. I truly am enjoying reading Andrew Sullivan's obsessive coverage of events in Iran, but I think his reading here is far too optimistic:
[T]his is the central event in modern history right now. The forces of democracy have marshalled in Iran for accountability, transparency and fairness. Wherever they marshall, we should stand with them, especially in the blogosphere, where our Iranian brothers and sisters built the foundation for this moment.Moreover, Iran is at the very heart of the global struggle between the forces of distorted and politicized religious tyranny and the power of real faith and freedom. This struggle was never ours' to impose, however good the intentions. It was always there for the people themselves to grasp. And grasp it they now have - with astounding courage, clarity and calm.
And so at the white-hot center of the global conflict, this astonishing force has emerged to resist escalation, unwind conflict, get past ideology, insist on change, and demand a better future. This is hopeful enough. But the use of technology to achieve this offers a whole new paradigm for world politics.
I hope Andrew's hopes are fulfilled. But I don't think they will be. Even if Moussavi and his forces triumph -- and let me say again, I hope they will -- how much will Iran change in ways that are beneficial to America's interests?
An opinion piece by New York librarian and professor Emily Walshe has me nodding in complete agreement:
A common criticism of such social-networking sites is that they cheapen friendship. But they're doing more than reducing its value: They're creating a shadow culture of friendship that spins cosmic sympathy into crowd sourcing.
With greater connectedness has come the ability for people to influence one another with more speed and efficiency. Social-networking sites - spurred by a resurgent "Secret" interpretation of the ancient Greek doctrine "like attracts like" - have become a potent medium for mass persuasion. [...]Friendship, like marriage, is a big attraction - a deep commitment to a nonblood relation. It is a relationship predicated on trust and nurtured, over time, through physical and metaphysical connection.
Critics consider the phenomena of chronic "friending" to be a kind of memetic narcissism, and excessive self-regard is surely part of its appeal. But these ever-widening concentric circles of congeniality are subtly turning the desire for friendship into sinister temptations for power or profit.
Do read the whole thing; the writer deplores the commercialism of this kind of "friending" where number of "friends," perceived influence, and the ability to give financial kickbacks in various ways to one's "friends" is corrupting the whole notion of friendship.
I get that some people enjoy social networking sites, and that others find them useful in some way or other. To a certain extent I know my dislike of them is related to my temperament, and the fact that I can't see the attraction in what seems to be a lot of glorified triviality, the chronicling of the events of one's day in tiny repetitive bursts of short words. Frankly, the last time speech was like that in my house I still had toddlers acting as a harness to my natural inclination to verbosity; blogging may be brief compared to novel-writing or even feature-writing, but compared to tweeting or posting on someone's wall, blogging is as expansive and as expository as a Dickens novel.
But the other thing about blogging is that if you blog, and if you're lucky enough, you have "readers," who may or may not become friends in any sense; the word "reader" implies nothing more than someone who reads your ideas, either because he likes them, or because he dislikes them and enjoys disagreeing, or because he is violently apathetic to them and never wastes an opportunity to tell you what a disappointment you are. On social networking sites, however, everybody's your friend, or wants to be; the word "friend," in a social networking context, has become a verb.
But "friend" is not the verb form of the word. That would be "befriend." To befriend someone is to do something active, positive; it is to act in such a way that friendship is fostered, at a level where the person is actually known or where you come to know him or her. The difference between the active cultivation of a friendship and "friending" someone are like the difference between planting a garden and photographing a painting of a garden; the one requires slow, careful, patient effort, and the other is essentially an act of observation with the possibility and within the context of appreciation.
Like I said, I understand that social networks are enjoyed by many and seem to fill a legitimate need for connection. But they employ the language of a more intimate relationship than the rather businesslike one that they facilitate. Perhaps the word "friend" should return to being a noun, and a new word created to describe the connection between an interesting person and the several hundred people who have asked to be his "friend" because they find his brief daily messages interesting, or funny, or uplifting.
Since Rod's been posting so much this morning, I've been hanging back and reading like everybody else. But I can't help but share this one:
As ergonomics specialists know, using a computer can be a real pain -- in the neck, wrists, back, eyes, shoulders, etc. But it also leads to injuries that experts may not have considered, such as trips and falls over the printer cord, lacerations from the sharp corners of a CPU or bruised toes from dropping laptops on feet.
Accidents like these happen more often than you think. According to a study published in the July issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine -- the first to tally acute computer-caused injuries like cuts and bruises -- 9,300 Americans suffer such mishaps each year. Based on data from some 100 hospital emergency rooms across the country from 1994 to 2006, the study found that 78,703 people sustained injuries ranging from scrapes and bruises to contusions and torn muscles during the 13-year study period. [...]The study showed that the majority of computer-related injuries -- 93% -- happened at home. In all age groups, the most frequently diagnosed injury was laceration, making up 39% of cases. For adults, the leading cause of injury was hitting or getting caught on a part of a computer (37% of cases). Falling computer equipment accounted for 21% of cases, the second highest cause of injury, and among adults, hands, feet, arms and legs were the most frequently wounded parts of the body, making up 57% of all injuries.
Still, it's clear that there are more dangers involved with the using of technology than anybody thought. We should probably all abandon our computers at once, and go hang out in British pubs instead.
Or, we could just be a bit more careful--especially when we're moving computer equipment, as the computer-injury study co-author Lara McKenzie suggests:
McKenzie's study was designed to inform the debate about the establishment of official safety standards for home offices. She hopes the results will kick-start efforts to address the issue -- similar to previous efforts to reduce television-set-related injuries -- beginning with some practical safety tips. The Center for Injury Research and Policy has a helpful fact sheet that outlines common-sense computer safety, and McKenzie offers a few simple pointers as well: "Keep computer equipment away from the edges of desks. Organize cords and keep them out of the way. Anchor furniture and heavy computer components to the wall or to the floor." And when you're moving your computer, "check that the path is clear," she says, adding with a sigh, "So many people fell while they were carrying the computer."Feel free to share your computer-injury war stories below. Extra points if your story involves attempting to move computer equipment after enjoying the sorts of beverages served in British pubs.
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