Category: Modern Living

Mobile Mushrooms

Lepp and Barkley decided to conduct the study to see whether using cellphones — despite their portability —shared the same ties to inactivity as playing traditional video games and watching TV.

“There’s been evidence that those types of behaviors that are defined as sedentary are inversely related to fitness,” Barkley said. “The phones now, especially the smartphones, offer access to all those behaviors we have defined as sedentary.”

Apple Ressurects AT&T’s “You Will” Ad Campaign

“In what should be a warm, humanizing montage, people are constantly directing their attention away from one another and the real, panoramic world to soak in pixels. They’re choosing the experience of their products over the experience of other people several times in quick succession. And Apple has a warm voice in the background, goading us on.” – Mark Wilson

Yes, I agree in 20 years this Apple ad will seem as ridiculously quaint as overly-technology-ified as AT&T’s “You Will” campaign from the 1990’s.

Have you ever felt that technology is far less useful than it promises to be?

You Will.

No, There is No Pony. Never Was.

Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. Trying to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Yet instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to all fours, and began digging.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the psychiatrist asked.

“With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

– Peter Robinson

Stop Being Such a Good Host

“An optimally adapted parasite takes as much from its host as possible without damaging the viability of the host. In order for us to stay viable hosts for the media parasite, we need only enough waking hours away from media to make money and to spend that money on advertisers’ offerings and/or media’s costs (and of course to feed ourselves and, like, stay alive). Media will gladly take all our other hours. Think about normal adult American life: After working, spending, and consuming media, how many hours do we really have left? Of course it will never get all of our spare time. But it captures more of our hours every year. Media is on an evolutionary trajectory, a curve bringing it closer and closer and closer to Infinite Jest.” – James A. Pearson

“Except you can’t.”

“The [Facebook Home] ad is an apt, if sanguine, depiction of what I’ve been calling ‘present shock,’ the human incapacity to respond to everything happening all at once. In a rapid-fire, highly commercial digital environment, this sense of an overwhelming ‘now’ reaches new heights. Unlike computer chips, human beings can only process one thing at a time. Whatever succeeds in attracting our attention only wins it at the expense of something else. Joke as we might like about it, our efficiency, our accuracy, our memory and our depth of understanding go down when we try to multitask.” – Douglas Rushkoff

Just Stop Being an Unpaid Documentary Filmmaker

“The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about it. Go home and think about it some more. Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel.” – James Shakespeare

Get Better

“Like everyone, though, I did have relationships — a spouse, friends and family — and none of them got the best version of me. They got what was left over.…I didn’t have to be on my BlackBerry from my first moment in the morning to my last moment at night. I didn’t have to eat the majority of my meals at my desk. I didn’t have to fly overnight to a meeting in Europe on my birthday. I now believe that I could have made it to a similar place with at least some better version of a personal life.” – Erin Callan

It reminds me, the Japanese have a word for death-by-work, karōshi.

I hope there’s a word for life-after-work.