Of things that make me hate life and want to destroy the earth, advertising continues to climb the ladder and teeters in the top three fighting for dominance against vocal performers and that J.K. Rowling has a career while Terry Pratchett dies of Alzheimers. And the field of advertising that causes me the largest amount of craw stuffing bile is the use of attack ads to push people into hating a product and thereby liking a different product. They enemy of the thing I don’t want or need makes me want the product that alerted me to the faults in the first thing.
No, that sentence doesn’t add up. But it shouldn’t. That is the point.
Specifics, that is the way that most things should be done. Especially things that are gibberish at their base.
So, specifically I am against attack ads that are also commercials for cell phones. And currently I work for a wireless company so perhaps I am biting the hand that feeds, perhaps that makes me more sensitive in general to the issues with them. Perhaps I am simply an angry angry man.
The point is that cell phones are a useful tool, a device that provides constant and immediate communication. And ultimately despite the shoddiness of communication in the modern world, communication as a whole is a good thing. Cell phones enable humanity to stay connected over vast distances and free you from the problems of staying at home to do it. They fuel innovation and creation in a way that is frightening in its magnitude and unsettling in its scope. Our current communications technology makes the communicators from Star Trek look like relics. And it is set three hundred years in the future, in a time when we are all likely to have a phone implanted in us from birth and the radicals will tear theirs out and move off grid to a world of long forgotten personal communication.
Or so I might hope. A freedom fighter in a cybernetic world is a role I would like to pursue. But as for the modern day and its communication devices, they are pushing their way outside of devices that let you speak to others and devices that do anything and everything to shunt humanity off from itself and each other. Each iteration of a phone offers more jangly shiny things that enable the phone to do more more MORE!
A recent commercial airing every few hours and causing me to flee into another room, change the channel, mute and begin cursing in tongues, is for the Droid phone. It does all the things the iPhone can’t, you see. By which it means that it does even more things that a phone doesn’t need to do, a personal computer stopped caring to do, and the human brain should spend time doing. That cyberization thing needs to come along soon, because the people of the developed world will soon be completely (more completely?) helpless in the face of a simple power outage.
I don’t need my phone to give me turn by turn directions, I have legs and I can consult people, maps, street signs, (phone books seem to have disappeared from the streets, which is a sad thing for people who are lost and need direction in a large city they find themselves suddenly in) so many ways to figure out where you are and where you are going, but no, without a voice in giving explicit Google run directives to you you cannot get out of the house it seems.
And it would be one thing if it were being advertised in a triumph of civilization, pinnacle of achievement, look at the progress kind of way –but no– it is marketed as if not having a glowing rod of plutonium sprouting from the phone and sending a beacon to the mothership makes whatever communication device you have a sad troglodyte of a bygone age. Do you spend the weekends sending smoke signals? Psssh, my phone has three different programs (application is such a pathetic term for something that by and large has no applicable purpose) that let me send and interpret messages sent as smoke signals. Isn’t that cool?
Cool, maybe, but can cool go back the way of James Dean, a rugged guy that didn’t care much for rules and wanted to live life by his own terms, a hands on approach to getting through life by means and not an excuse to wimp out when the wifi connection is sluggish?
Technology may be benign in its existence, the good and bad of it up for interpretation and whim, but it is high time we stopped pretending we need this shit and got back to working on problems that actually solve problems, not problems that create problems.
Filed under: Tame by Comparison
