Always On
How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future
— and Locked Us In
by Brian Chen
HM851 .C45 2011
New Arrivals, 2nd floor
If you’ve been reading New Stuff Tuesday for a while, you’ll know that I like road trips. Well, I just got back from driving out to Virginia with my cousins to visit my grandparents for Thanksgiving. They live in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, which provides amazing scenery and sadly, zero 3G coverage [or any cell phone reception for that matter]. That made the visit of a few days torturous because I couldn’t use my iPhone. This week’s featured title is a no-brainer, as it helped me realize that I might just have a problem.
Chen, columnist for Wired.com, starts out with claiming that even Steve Jobs didn’t realize the power his company’s revolutionary product that combines three essentials into one would amass. However, the author contends that the electronic device reaches far beyond our technological appetite and affects our society as a whole. The whole ‘there’s an app for that’ mentality has infiltrated our psyches and caused us to give up more than just a few brain cells from too much Angry Birds. He delves into Apple’s vertical business model and the competition’s race to clone their success, as well as the attacks on users’ privacy and freedom as a result. Chen brings out the implications and dangers for the ‘oh, shiny!’ techno-crowd in an easily digestible fashion and lists references for further research.
I can really relait to this. I got a Cell Phoan. One big unified “App,” the simplest I could get the Jitterbug (for “ageing babie boomers making breef infrequent call’s.”) If I dile eleven numbers in the right sequence I usually get to talk to some one who is not even in the saim room let alone county. Whitsch is tastic. Of coarse I onley use it if Emergency; if awaiting a call; or if in a city (where there are no moar public phoanes). Even so a 72-p. user’s’ manuel like with this and that No Thank’s.
I got an App for back-rode travel, its called a Mapp, specifically topograffick maps of every littel creak and vallie. And it surmounts battery failure and reception too.
I sailed across Lake Michigan with three Apps, Chart, Compas, and Light List (to dekoad the signals on the light Houses if I ever got there, whitsch I guess I did and back too.) And that was it. No GPS, UPS, AKA, FKA, WTF, or OMG (LOL…)
But the best App. to “tune in,” comes automatically after 20 minuets vigorous ride on the velo. “It” kikks in and gives me good Reception of–well, you’d have to of been there….
Well, Stay in Touch–my Land Line has an answering macheen……