Email: RE: society is doomed

Good day to you Master Malstrom.  I have some thoughts about your smart phone questions.Why prevalence of digital zombies?
With social networks, people like these because they provide bite-sized chunks of pleasure.  It is easy to consume “updates” because they are so small and easy.  Like playing Pacman for five minutes instead of RTS that requires long periods of concentration.  And you can do it anywhere.  Now you can communicate or consume without the barrier of a cumbersome computer, tying you to a desk or carrying around a six pound laptop.  And Apple’s touchscreen revolution made it pleasurable.  The brain is lazy.  When a reward is deemed valuable (pleasure), the brain normally prefers small, simple actions and quick results.  Challenge gives another kind of pleasure, that of accomplishment, but removing challenges makes something more accessible.

Why women entranced?
I don’t believe there is now much of a skew away from 50% users one gender or the other.  Men dominated computer programming in the 80s because changing config files was required to use a computer, and was almost a purpose in itself.  In terms of traditional gender roles, I think “masculine” aspects are more inclined to do things where the mean is the end (how)(complications of hunting), while “feminine” aspects want to cut through bullshit and just do a thing (what)(gathering food from a tree).  The touchscreen smart phone that goes a pocket makes the latter mode more accessible.  I don’t know about how things go in the south, but in the north where I am from, by the mid-90s, my perception was a near even split concerning computer use.  I knew more women who were interested in using the internet than men. It was women who got me interested in bulletin boards, AOL, and Myst. 

 

As for Microsoft and Sony using consoles to prop up the rest of the company.  I remember when the first xbox was coming around.  People said Microsoft wants to be in everybody’s living room and this was like their Trojan horse.  Kinect and full room projector are very much along the same lines Bill Gates “predicted” in his book The Road Ahead.  Surface tablet evolved from the $10000 coffee table-sized tablet.  Microsoft has always wanted to make smart house.  Sony being a media and device company naturally wants to be in the living room as well.So what you guys are saying is that the smartphone isn’t turning people into digital zombies. It is that people are digital zombies beforehand and the smartphone is just a more accessible means to enter the Vanilla Sky of digital land.

I’ll be jumping off the building soon enough. The Internet has become nothing more than ego stroking, and everyone believing they are a great intellectual. The Internet is also no longer safe with entities such as the NSA and Prism. Within a year and a half, I should become 100% unplugged. I want a real life before I die.