Print is the New Vinyl?

Before we move on beyond this accidental series on digital domination, one interesting and perhaps delightful (if true) countertrend. However, first let's restate the trend, with the eloquent opening to Leon Wieseltier's New York Times Book Review essay (with my emphases), in your Sunday Times today and online:

 "Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. 

Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous." 

 The death knell for non-digital reading and writing is often sounded, sometimes with lived alarm, sometimes with complacent (I've made my money and reputation thanks) acceptance. But leave it to my favorite newspaper columnist, Jon Carroll at the San Francisco Chronicle, to find (or maybe make up, just a little) a somewhat countervailing trend: "Print is the new vinyl."

 These words were uttered, he writes, by a tech savvy entrepreneur, suggesting a trend that combines retro with realization (that analogue records offer better sound than digital.) Together they fantasized a sweet (if likely brief, or if ever) future:

 "So perhaps the latest bunch of tech billionaires want quality too. They want long-form journalism, say, that can be reproduced in a portable and well-designed format. They want editing and fact-checking. Perhaps they want fiction, poetry, excerpts from the classics.

 Nothing like old media to add that sheen of prestige. The guy I was with suggested that writers might once again make actual money, that the sight of someone carrying a book would be like seeing someone toting around a dulcimer — it indicates that they have hidden depths. We’re talking about a covert desire to follow the dream of the Enlightenment." 

 A last ditch dream? Probably. But I do recall that on several visits to a fashionable cafe in Menlo Park not far from Stanford--close enough to ground zero for the tech world--I saw more people reading books, newspapers and magazines than were starring at laptops and tablets, or even conspicuously glued to their smartphones etc. A definite counter-trend to, for instance, the HSU campus.

Keyless Cars, Brainless Humans

Phones and other electronic devices may be smarter, but people seem to be heading the other way into a brainless stupor.

 It's not just the kids who literally cannot be separated from their phones without psychological and even physical trauma. There's an even more serious form of dependency, and it is becoming less and less avoidable, even for those who reject it.

 For instance the keyless car. An item in Consumer Reports recently affirmed that new cars in all price ranges are coming equipped with this technology. What is this electronic marvel? It allows you to start your car without sticking a physical key into a physical slot. You just push a button on your device, known as the key fob (even though there is no key attached to it.)

 What a miracle! You can start your car with your hands full of something else--your smartphone probably. Although you've had to push a button on the fob to get into the car, and then you still have to push another button in the car. But you don't need that damn inconvenient key.

 So let's start with the basic rule of electronic wonders in and on your car, which is that, for all their benefits, they are each something else that can go wrong. Usually more than one something else. And almost always nothing you can fix yourself.

 So there are things that can go wrong with your fob, such as the batteries, and if you don't have a backup system (electronic or key), you're screwed. You ain't moving. It may mean a tow, and it definitely means time and money.

 But that's minor compared to the much more likely possibility--you misplace or lose the fob. Then without a mechanical key system, you are really really screwed. And CR says replacing the fob could cost hundreds of dollars, and who knows how much time and trouble.

 Think about it. When somebody swiped my jacket with my car keys in the pocket, I got someone to drive me home, wait a minute while I got my duplicate key, then he drove me back to my car. Duplicate keys cost a few bucks, and you can make as many as you want and stow them in as many convenient places as you wish, so losing your car keys is not a catastrophe.  Many people attach a duplicate to the car itself.

 But for the dubious benefits of a "keyless" ignition, you still have to have that fob (although eventually there will be an ap on your phone device, which will make losing that even more catastrophic), and the cost of losing it is much much greater than losing that terrible old fashioned key.

 Behind this is the survival principle of redundancy, along with hedging your bets with alternatives (a gas stove that operates even when the electricity is off, etc.) Everybody loses stuff, so you cut down the consequences with redundancy (i.e. duplicate keys.) That is, while you can still buy a car that allows you to start it with a key.

 And that's the most brainless part of it. An entire society so dazzled with new toys that they never bother to think ahead to what could go wrong, and what the comparative consequences might be. It's great for the car companies etc. who sucker you into this, and then charge you hundreds of dollars for a fob, and thousands for extra electronic toys that may or may not improve the operation of your vehicle, but certainly make it harder and more expensive to repair. When something goes wrong. And something always does.

 But you might have paid tens of thousands of dollars for no alternative. How smart is that?