The Relativity Of The iPhone Part 3

Electronic devices expand the amount of time available. Their very speed of comm (communication) speeds things up, expands "free" time, and "shrinks" the distance in time between places in the world.

If you happen to be an alienated person, not just a teenager trying to avoid adults and their discontents, the time of alienation has magnified, the places of boredom have increased.

What is clearly of paramount importance is what we fill the excess time with.

Let us think about that.

It brings to mind an old e-gadget, the telegraph. In many movies set in the Old West, the telegraph runs alongside the railroad lines that span the country; settlers move in, cattle are herder, cowboys go into town... and the native peoples are subjected to genocide.

I do not mean to connect genocide and the telegraph. The dislocation of native populations started back around Andrew Jackson's time, well before the telegraph, and the Indians were turned into refugees herded into refugee camps called reservations, and these reservations created a vast Gulag system across the face of the Old West.

Connections? Doubtful, although speedy comm may have helped move soldiers around to the right hot spots of native disaffection. Yet there is no connection between electronic tech and genocide... even though there was that history written about Tom Watson and IBM and how IBM sold business machines to the Nazis, who put the punch-card system to good use in organizing their Final Solution.

Mankind is good and evil. If there are e-gadgets, they will be used for good and evil.

Still something like a shadow of ever-biting conscience nags at me, for if the time available to do good and evil is increased, then just how bloody important is it to try to ensure that more good than evil be done in that newly created time?

How do we fill the Time?

Not very long ago, people wrote about the new leisure society, a society where work hours followed a trend to decrease, wealth would be maintained with decreased effort, and great princely suns of leisure time would confront us. Our biggest problem would be, "What do we do with all this free time?"

That was just before it became the norm for wife and husband to both work just to keep afloat, and one of them possibly had to take a night job in order to pay for pre-school for the children.
In this case, we filled in the increases of time with stagnant wages, loss of jobs, etc. and managed to deflect the bane of leisure.

Consider the electronic item Television.
It created fast entertainment, giving us more free time.
In the old days, to entertain ourselves we had to do things like get everyone together, pick up teams, play lengthy games that might go on endlessly through nine innings or four quarters. Endless. Television allowed us an entertainment break that only took an hour or so.
Great free time abounded.

Only we filled up the theoretical time freed from the time needed for Recreation with more TV.
We filled up the TV with what Newton Minow of the FCC called "a vast wasteland".
Television gave birth to cable - which was free back in the beginnings! - and cable was a protean birth that looked around at the immense playpen it found itself in - vast amounts of Time! Cable gave birth to the 24/7 News cycle plague which oppresses the viewer even more than lack of news ever did.

Those kids in the photo - they are good kids. And they are clear proof that good kids come from good e-gadgets, right? Yet there will be many years ahead of those kids and what stories and influences will affect them?
Will they hear stories of heroes and heroines, honor and fidelity, truth and fortitude, or will the stories be of conflict, of despair and end-of-time horror, of violence and hatred? What is the Mix of good and evil? I think the balance is tipped to evil in the present day.

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Immedia versus Social Media

I am reading The Washington Post article:

13, right now
This is what it's like to grow up in the age of likes, lols and longing
Story by Jessica Contrera
Photos by Victoria Milko
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/wp/2016/05/25/2016/05/25/13-right-now-this-is-what-its-like-to-grow-up-in-the-age-of-likes-lols-and-longing/

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade...

And once again I ask myself whether Social Media brings us closer together, farther apart, or is neutral as to immediacy.

As I think it, I create the word "Immedia" which seems in my brain to stand for immediate and intimate activity between persons; of course, it brings to mind Heidegger's being-in-the-world versus what I had called having-in-the world.

In this article, the young girl has vastly more connection with large numbers of people than individuals did in the pre-iPhone days and the pre-Internet days. And rather than asking about the effect of such a large amount of communications, I only ask if these communications - even considered singly one at a time - may have the same effect of face-to-face interaction.

It seems to me the answer in in the subtitle; it is the acronym "lol".

Electronic Communication lacks gesture, touch, deep affect: for example, we usually cannot see the face of those to whom we speak. But even with Skype and camera, the experience of facial recognition is flat and bland.

LOL was devised due to the ambiguity of internet chat and emails, for language alone often leaves it unclear whether one is happy, mad, sarcastic, solicitous, etc. Those emotions are more easily conveyed in person.
So LOL was devised in order to let the recipient know the sender was happy and laughing... at least the sender wanted the recipient to believes so.

So new modular expressions come into being to attempt to fill the voids left by electronic communication, thereby demonstrating that there are many such voids in the first place, and these empty spaces are like interstellar dust between us and distant galaxies, obscuring the far - and near - brilliance.


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The iPhone

She-who-must-be-obeyed received a brand-new iPhone, so I inherited the older version, which took the place of my 2001 Nokia with a teddy bear logo on the screen (I inherited that phone from my daughter when she upgraded and I dismissed my old Nextel.)

 Answer the phone, wouldja!? I'm busy!"

I was fond of the Nextel sort of walkie-talkie ability that we made great use of in business. Progress is inexorable in its march to greater things, sort of a Die Welt ist mein Feldt  ethos that turns a more service oriented Mein Feldt ist die Welt on its blooming head.
(Die Welt ... "the world is my field, which gives an idea of unstoppable autocracy versus Mein Feldt ... "my field is the world", which gave the notion of service to the world, which is where the idea came from, being used on the bow figure of the SS Imperator of the Hamburg America Line while she traversed the Atlantic Ocean.)

I got the Nokia and signed up with T-Mobile until October, 2015. I was always pay-as-you-go, and it was commonplace to run out of minutes at the worst possible time.

So I have an iPhone now, one of the classics, to be sure, to be sure.  I like my cellular phones the way the residents of Havana like their cars: classic.  Everything old-timey.
Just yesterday I was at Bishop Airport in Flint and I fancied I was driving with dynamic airflow and wearing a grey fedora. I had some sort of 1940s pipe in my pocket. I drove into Bishop, parked at the phone lot waiting to be summoned, the call came, I pulled out and drove to the terminal in 70 seconds whereupon I slid right into the Southwest section, grabbed a few club bags, stowed them, esteemed She-who-must-be-obeyed, and drove off to the exit which was 120 second away.
From there I drove to the expressway (or limited access road, as we say) which was two red lights and 4 minutes down the pike.
Home was 36 miles and 40 minutes away. Traffic was light.

 Bishop Airport, Flint, Michigan

I have many bells and whistles on my iPhone, as you all undoubtedly know.
I set an alarm to sound at 4 bells this morning to remind me to get the garbage ready to set outside. The alarm was some sort of gizmo-sound accompanied by buzzing and vibration.

Since I was writing, I never even heard it.

I vaguely remember hearing the iPhone sitting right next to me vibrating and buzzing, and vaguely wondering what the devil the blasted thing was up to now.

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