Facebook - The Digital Front Porch

First picture I posted of me and Daisy

People make fun of Facebook friends who post pictures of their dinners, their dogs and cats, or the first snow falling on their patio. Yet, somehow, these are some of the most popular posts on FB. I can post a profound piece on politics or religion that I think is earth-shaking and get a couple of thumb's up. But I post a picture of Mama's mashed potatoes or the dog napping in my lap and generate dozens of likes and comments. Why are people interested in all that mundane stuff. Why do I get 95 "likes" for a picture of my wife laughing her head off while we're taking our anniversary picture.

I think it's because these posts are like an invitation by a friend to come by the house. It's an spontaneous kind of intimacy with friends and neighbors that we've somehow lost when we quit building homes with decent front porches.

Oh, I occasionally tweak a liberal friend and get into a running debate over something Trump did or some comment I made disparaging some beloved tenet of progressivism. And we've had some tub-thumper arguments, but hey. Back in the olden days, we used to do that sort of thing with a Coke in hand with friends on the porch of the local grocery and gas station with a bunch or other old geezers looking for a fight. 

Facebook has taken over the role of the old front porch. In exactly the same way that we used to talk about our cars, our grandkids, or the latest backyard project we have going, we post pictures and comments about our personal lives on Facebook so people we know and like can feel like they are keeping up with us.

I occasionally bump into an old friend or family member that I haven't seen in a while, and as we talk, I realize that we are taking up threads of conversations leftover from posts we made on Facebook or other social media. "How was that trip to Cancun?" you ask, having seen the 44 pictures she posted of the trip. "I see your granddaughter is really sprouting up."  You can say that because grandma has posted 157 pictures of the kid documenting every day of the child's life since birth. A lot of millenial precious snowflakes make fun of us older folk for posting the stuff that we do, but hey, at least we don't post hourly selfies showing who we are with at the moment, where we are standing and what we are wearing.

I try to post interesting things, but I'm also guilty of having posted more than my share of cute doggie pictures over the years. I still occasionally post pictures of my dog Daisy even though she's been dead a year and a half. Facebook even helps out by suggesting that I repost old pictures I posted five or six years ago. I am often surprised how many of those old pictures are of me and the dog.

You can criticize Zuckerberg all you want for his liberal bias, but the boy does understand the appeal of the digital front porch he's created. If he and his minions can just stand to not try and tell us all what we can talk about on our own porches, Facebook could last forever in some form or another - or at least till the world comes to an end (a subject about which we can also debate on the "porch" with several dozen of our closest digital buddies).

Facebook posts don't have to be profound. Social media is the digital successor of front porches, Saturday night jam sessions down at the VA, the town square, the pen pal, and the sister who calls you on the phone and talks for two hours. So I'll go on posting my dog pictures and my latest do-it-myself project photos and I'm not ashamed! If you want to look at the couch I reupholstered myself or the cigar box banjo I built or me playing with Jellybean, you're welcome. If you'd rather look at selfies of your friends, then there's a place for that too.

Tell you what; I won't make fun of your selfies if you won't make fun of my photos of homemade pizza!  Okay?

© 2017 by Tom King

"Bare"ing Burdens - New Fad or Deterioration In Public Spelling Awareness

Okay, really? A thong? You just  can't unsee some things?

For some reason lately I've seen a plethora of posts on Facebook lately, which talk about "bearing" something in the sense of carrying a burden. The trouble is these multiple witnesses have used the term "BARING" or "Bareing" to indicate that they mean they were "carrying" or "tolerating" something.

Either some authority has changed the spelling and/or meaning of the term and didn't tell me, or it's one of those crazy new fads that everyone is going along with. Perhaps there has been a sudden mass outbreak of either misspelling or nudity while carrying burdens. I shall watch this trend carefully. You see Friday is my shopping day and on that day, I usually can be found "bearing" burdens in some public place or other. 

If I am to "bare" my burdens in order to comply with the new cultural imperative, then I am confused.  Has "No-pants Friday" come to enjoy a surprising popularity in both the Pacific Northwest and East Texas. Most of the posts about "bareing" burdens seem to have come largely from these two areas - regions known to contain many heavily-armed individualists for some inexplicable reason that has been lost to the mists of time.

Don't get me wrong. While I have no personal problem with pursuits like nude vacuuming, naked dish-washing or skinny-scuba diving, I fear I shall have to draw the line at strolling the aisles of Walmart while "bareing" anything not normally bared in a public setting. I forebear to do this out of concern for the mental health of innocent young people whose mother's have dragged them along on the weekly shopping trip. I also do not wish to be responsible for throwing a craving on some unsuspecting elderly grandmother in the sewing notions aisle.

If it was just smart-alec twenty and thirty-somethings who might be upset at the sight of a 62 year-old large hairy guy bending over the banana bin, I wouldn't give a hoot. It is my ambition to shock and horrify as many young people as possible before, I some day pitch face-first into my spinach lasagna.  I do, however, intend to limit such shocks to acts of elderly protest such as wearing black socks with shorts, ugly hats and brightly colored Hawaiian shirts, or by mispronouncing words like "quinoa" and "Niçoise" in front of them. I'd rather upset the little darlings by wearing tee-shirts that say things like "Armed and Cranky" "Ted Cruz - 2016" or "Get a Job Hippie"; not by "bareing" any of my more personal burdens however well-sculpted and muscular they might be.

Just sayin'.

© 2016 by Tom King

The Soon-To-Be Lost Art of the Gentleman's Disagreement

Sometimes best friends are united by their disagreement over politics and religion. Wouldn't it be nice to live in a culture where old friends could sit on the porch and argue politics like gentlemen, share a tall cold glass of sweet tea and enjoy the back and forth of friendly verbal sparring.

One wonders who it is that has convinced us all that anyone who disagrees with us is our enemy. We live in a nation founded on the recognition that each of us is different.

We have fifty states so that you can find one that suits your political, social and economic clothes simply by moving a few hundred miles or so. We put limits on our government and balanced the three branches so that none of them may declare themselves absolute power and that we all might agree to disagree, preserve the right to be who and what we are and continue to live in peace.

The greatest threat to peace and liberty today is the insidious belief that anyone who disagrees with me needs to be shut up. Storm's a comin' folk!

Tom King
© 2015

The Vanishing Art of Conversation

There's an excellent post in today's "Art of Manliness" weblog called "The Power of Conversation".  The post offers up the idea that our tech has altered our conversation in ways that prevent real conversation.  I've noticed that in my own experience, especially since the early 90s as more and more people have gone online in a big way.

I grew up before texting, cell phones and blogging, but I embraced technology early, in large part because I could do all this communicating from home without a large expense for driving around places. As a 40 year veteran of the nonprofit wars, my funds for socializing have always been somewhat limited.

One problem, however, with conversation by social media. Twitter with its draconian limitation on the number of characters you may use and the rapid fire exchanges encouraged by social media which hides the majority of any post that's more than a few lines long, social media users are encouraged over time to communicated in an abbreviated style. Ultimately one winds up communicating in sound bites.

When you have to get it all into 140 characters, you tend toward sensational, slogans and advertising jingle type posts and reject arguments or even discussions that require a lot of explanation or detail. It's the conversational equivalent of slam, bam, thank you mam! There is little room in this sort of conversation for nuance and no room at all for body language, slips of the tongue or unconscious social cues of the sort that make in-person conversations so surprising.

Another problem with this type of communication is that it encourages a kind of verbal sparring style of talking, especially when you are exchanging text blocks with someone you may not agree with. As a rule, most of us dislike conflict as a rule. In public settings or private conversations, it can sometimes be difficult to disengage from a conversation without hearing something that challenges our opinions and beliefs or takes us out of our intellectual comfort zone.

In social media, it's easy to unfriend or block someone who says things we don't like. That's kind of unfortunate, because as we do that we soon find ourselves in an intellectual echo chamber from which we have banished any voice that challenges our comfortable belief system.

Some thing that's a good thing. These people join cults or become members of religions or political parties from which they exclude anything or anyone that might challenge their narrow ideology. In a way social media actually encourages people to bunch together with only those who reinforce their own ideas.

But that's not how we are designed to learn and grow intellectually or spiritually. Even God can bear to be questioned. It's significant that the premise of the oldest book of the Bible, The Book of Job, was about this very issue. Job didn't know why all the bad things were happening to him and he asked God for an explanation. Jobs friends, however, tried to shame him into NOT asking those questions. Instead they presumed to know the mind of God and to tell Job why he was being punished. In the end of Job, God offered no explanation to Job, but told him he wouldn't understand, but that he should trust him. He also had Job offering up sacrifices for his friends' sin of presuming to speak for God.

"By engaging with those with whom we disagree, we end up growing and examining our own ideas more closely, even if we don’t ultimately change our minds." say Brett and Kay McKay. This is why I seek out conversations with people with whom I disagree. It's cost me some readers who find longer articles like this particular Art of Manliness Article to be tedious and to avoid them.

Because our social media style discourages in-depth reading and thinking and leads us to avoid conversations with those we dislike, we become stunted in our ability to carry out deeper level reasoning. As a result, we make ourselves vulnerable to flimflam orators who tell us what we want to hear and we do not examine the orator's real positions any more deeply than can be perceived in the loud authoritative bellowing of a Hitler, a Stalin of for that matter, a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton. The social media-trained conversationalist instinctively shies away from someone like Ben Carson whose communication style is deeper and more nuanced and lacks the self-assured bombast of his chief rival in the race for president. Carson, a man who knows better than to think we know everything we need to know just now, forces us to think more deeply than we are comfortable thinking. The twitter society doesn't like to read more than 140 words at a time. 


I've decided to risk challenging the 140 character limit and write till I'm done with my thought. I may even start doing a video podcast, just so I can get in the voice inflection and the body language that backs up your own half of a good conversation.
 
I'm not going to do what a lot of self-appointed doomsayers do in this kind of post and condemn society, technology and everything else we can find that is suitable for demonizing. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our technology or in society. The fault is in ourselves. If we wish to save our brains for something more useful than as a counterweight for our couch potato butts, we need to stretch our ability to piece thoughts together that are longer than 140 characters.  Just saying.

So, if you have any thoughts on this subject, please write them out fully in the comments section below. I read them all, even and especially the long ones. Some of the best conversations I've had so far on social media have been with people who challenge my assumptions and are willing to allow me to challenge theirs. I think, that if we all did that, perhaps our beloved country would not be as divided as it is today.

Tom King (c) 2015

Photo by:  Thomas Szynkiewicz

Happiness and Joy: Why is America a Sadder Place Than It Used to Be?

© Floyd Scholz, Master Carver

I wound up in a discussion with some banjo players recently about happiness and joy. A recent study found that the United States, the world's entertainment and fun leader and arguably the wealthiest in the world (how else could we afford that much debt), ranked a mere 21st in "happiness" among all nations. Ironically, Iceland, a land of perpetual winter, with a population ranked nearly the highest among nations for alcoholism and seasonal affective disorder ranked number 1 in "happiness".  Given that a pint of beer costs what most people make in a day there, one has to be pretty determined, not to mention hard-working to have an alcohol problem in Iceland.  So why, asked one wag, aren't we happier than we are?

At the risk of offending ardent feminists, I'm going to comment on this matter. I believe it has something to do with sex - not the kind you have mind you, but the kind you are. Men and women ARE different. The thought police like to say we're no different, but we are.  Scientists once tried to prove it was just how we were raised by giving girl children building blocks and other boy toys and by giving boys Barbie dolls and play houses when they were toddlers in order to demonstrate that it was all about environment.  What they learned was that building blocks are useful in building the accouterments for hosting tea parties and in building play houses and the toy people to live in them.  They also learned that if you bend Barbie at the waist and grasp her by the legs, she makes a serviceable gun and playhouses are good cover in a firefight.

Happiness is experienced differently for different people.  Men, a congenitally goal-directed lot find happiness more frequently in pursuit sports, combat sports and games and in hobbies which produce something like woodworking, hot-rod building, gunsmithing and comet-spotting.  Women, on the other hand are biologically hard-wired to create and nurture family circles tend to find happiness in social activities, collecting, making stuff for others and things which serve to make those around them happy with some sort of relative uniformity.

I worked as a recreation therapist for many years and found that women gained more therapeutic benefit from activities that met this need to create balance and fairness and nurture happiness in the entire group. Even when I had girls going along with boys in horse-back riding activities, the boys were all about racing, positioning their horse farther ahead in the line, exploring trails. For the girls it was more about the social aspects of the trail ride. Even when they engaged in "racing" it was usually more about establishing a social bond than it was about winning the race.  The only times I ever got hard-nosed competiton with girls was over boys or when it was my happy circle vs. your happy circle. 

My contention is that as women in American culture have moved into leadership roles, they've brought with them this need for everybody to be happy (a good thing in healthy families) into the culture itself. We've become less about what we accomplish and more about how we feel as a result. But I think men and women are wired one way or the other, whether you believe God did it or some lengthy evolutionary process. I think as women have brought their need for everything to be a win/win into the public square, it's changed the game.  I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing. I am saying that it explains the rise of progressive socialism (the political need to make everyone happy and equal) and the increasing difficulty we have as Americans with being happy.

It seems that for women to be happy, everyone around them must be happy or their joy cannot be complete. It is why women take hostess duties so seriously. Biologically, they need for everyone at the party to be having a good time or they cannot be happy themselves. Don't confuse happiness with joy, however. 

When Christians talk about joy, it's a different thing than happiness, which is more transitory. Joy is a transcendent experience - a confidence in the outcome of life. Joy is something we get when we've made sense of our life story and gained peace with who we are and what we are. If we gain joy, then happiness comes far more easily to us. As Nehemiah said, "The joy of the Lord is my strength."

There are those who accept the feminine ideal of happiness - everyone being okay - who also have come to the mistaken conclusion that in order for everyone to be happy we all must be equal. By "equal" they take it to mean "the same". Unfortunately, for that theory, making everybody the same (uniforms, equal pay no matter what job you do, same houses, same transportation, etc.) sameness seems to have have exactly the opposite effect.


Perhaps our problem is that Americans have lost their joy. Perhaps, where once we were certain that life would get better and that there was some meaning to our sojourn here on this earth, we have come to think of life as either an arbitrary crap shoot, the result of random chance and random evolution or, worse yet, the result of exploitation and manipulation by the privileged class. I think that's an artifact of the rise of the introduction of a pervasive post-modernist philosophy into our culture. Post-modernism rejects the idea that things will get better and that life has meaning. There was a poster/bumper sticker that was popular in the 70s and 80s that proclaimed, "Shit happens!" The underlying message was that things just happen arbitrarily. There is no meaning; no grand purpose. You can't do anything about it. The supposedly wise among us, the university professors and television pundits, proclaimed it a realistic view of the world and many in our culture accepted it uncritically as truth. Our cutting edge films and television shows these day reflect that emptiness and despair.

It's as though the whole country has developed bipolar disorder and swings alternately between despair and mania - neither of which are any fun let me tell you. It makes sense that it should be so, if, as the gurus say, life is meaningless.  Fortunately, there is still a sizable core of Americans left who believe life does mean something, that we ARE going somewhere good and that playing the banjo on the back porch is plenty fun and expresses our inner joy thank you very much.

Just one man's opinion,

Tom King

© 2013 by Tom King

Is this the end of.....

(insert pet cultural sacred cow here)

by Tom King (c) 2012

What got me going this time was a forum post that said in big bold letters:

I DON'T WANT TO START TROUBLE BUT:

IS THIS THE END OF EDUCATION AS WE KNOW IT?




Electronic entertainment didn't replace active sports and
gamesany more than sports and games replaced
productive work as some feared it would. Each
enhanced our recreational choices. Nothing more.

It included a link to one of those "educational" Youtube videos with dire predictions of the coming crash of the economy,  famine, flood or a massive shortage of cheese. In this case it was the end of "education". Of course this dude wanted to start trouble. Otherwise why be cryptic unless he wanted to get us to watch his "shocking" video and kick up the number of pageviews for his Youtube page's advertising?

As to the premise that something's going to "end education as we know it", I think it's highly unlikely.  Remember:

1. They said photography would kill art.

2. They said records would be the death of live music for the masses (mostly piano teachers worried about that - after all their livelihoods were on the line they thought).

3. They said movies would be the death of books and the theater and vaudeville. It only killed vaudeville and it can be argued that vaudeville needed to die.

4. They said radio would be the death of records. Why buy music when you can listen to it for free on radio?

5. They said TV would be the death of, not only radio, but also the movies and books. Apparently movies hadn't killed books completely yet.

6. They said computers would kill creativity.

7. They said video games would kill creativity.

8. They said the Internet would kill libraries, books, radio, movies and music. All of these, for some reason, have all kept on breathing despite all the murderous technologies that came before.

9. They said that testing would kill "real" education. By this I think some teachers mean the sort of education that nobody bothers to actually check up on once in a while to see if the kids are actually learning anything.

I have discovered that children are pretty much impervious to all attempts to turn them into robotic factory workers or mindless zombies. The German system of graded schools, which the US adopted in the early 20th century, seems to have had, as its purpose, to teach kids to show up on time, do repetitive work, shut up and follow orders. Turns out that's exactly what the Germans had in mind. That is after all how you make productive munitions factory workers. But, despite the arguably sinister intent of the German school system, the similarly regimented school system adopted by American schools seems to have utter failed to squash the creativity out of our own childrens.

Of course, some kids will always grow up to be mindless zombies, but then if they didn't where would we get our politicians and tax accountants from? Anyway, I don't think we need to be entirely discouraged by the educational doomsday prophets. After all it turns out that:

1. Photographs became their own art form and painting continued to flourish.

2. Recordings encouraged people to learn to play music and now they make their own recordings and more people's music is actually heard today than every before.

3. Movies brought stories to life, gave tens of thousands of people jobs putting those stories on film and encouraged thousands to take up writing and music and cinematography and acting. It even borrowed stories from the theater and revived interest in plays. The Lion King started out as a Disney movie before it became a hit Broadway musical. And vaudeville simply went on TV, radio and Las Vegas casino stages. What's "America's Got Talent", but a vaudeville review.

4. Radio actually popularized new types of music and brought genres like country and bluegrass music to a vast new audience and gave us Earl Scruggs whose radio gigs made him a living when he needed one.  Radio actually invented rock n' roll - not a destroyer it turned out, but a creator.

5. Television took radio stories and let us see the action. Radio changed. The theater and TV cross-pollinated to the benefit of both genres and the artists that worked in both mediums.

6. Computers allowed millions of people to produce works of art, writing and create new technologies. Computers turned out to be really good tools and not mind-sucking brain controllers after all.

7. Video games, it turns out, encouraged a generation to create new worlds and new ideas. Video game technology has spurred advances in movie special effects, interactive story-telling has become a whole new genre of writing and can even be used to help rehabilitate and retrain minds injured by trauma.

8. The Internet quickly became the instrument for connecting libraries and book collections everywhere, so effectively that if you want to look up a 200 year old book, you can probably download the entire text from the net in a matter of seconds simply by doing a word search. Libraries have begun putting rare materials online where everyone can look at them and not just the few who can get to Walrus Hollow Maine or the Library of Congress to dig around in the stacks.

9. Education is as it has always been. Any time you place children in proximity with ideas and books and art and music, they have this uncomfortable (for their elders) habit of thinking thoughts you never intended for them to think.

We tend to think original thoughts, despite attempts to indoctrinate us to a single set of values or beliefs. We have an indomitable desire to create that is hard-wired into us.  And our innate free will allows us to choose what we value and belief despite our upbringing.  We can either choose not to be what our fathers were or to be exactly what they were.  These traits of human beings make me hopeful for the world.

And remember, these very traits of humans were what scared Lucifer so badly that he rebelled. He thought God was making a serious mistake to make us the way he did, with unfettered free will. I have to side with God though. I think He did the right thing making us stubborn, resilient and independent like we are. I think there's hope for us - at least those who bother to learn how to use the brains we were given. I think most of us will learn the right lesson in the end, in spite of the best efforts of our teachers to keep the truth from us.

Just one man's opinion

Tom King



Networking in the New Millennium

The Rolodex Dies in Darkness

Friendship Redefined

In just a couple of decades, the concept of friendship has undergone a polar swap – though nothing so drastic as the Mayans might have predicted, but a pretty significant one for society in the new world.  Even the term “friend” has become a verb as in “to friend” or to grant someone friend status on your favorite social media website and thereby the right to access personal information about you and to engage in conversation with you at will.

Used to be you built a friend network through repeated social contacts, exchange of letters, phone calls and visits. Practically, your network of friends consisted of a relative handful of close friends and a couple more handfuls of acquaintances. If you were a celebrity, a lot of people knew you that you barely recognized.

Enter the Age of the Rolodex

A generation of business gurus began teaching you how to collect business cards and turn the sturdy Rolodex into a networking tool of incredible power. Audio tapes and later video tapes were offered up to teach you the secrets that high power and incredibly rich business executives used to build networks of contacts that enabled them to wield power and make obscene amounts of money. It took serious work to manage the hundreds of contacts in your Rolodex and to make them all feel like you were their buddy, but in the process we learned the power of having knowledge about people at your fingertips.

Enter the Computer Age

The Rolodex was soon threatened by a legion of contact management software solutions. Rolodex itself soon got into the act and before long specialized calendar/contact tools like SideKick became a business staple. Everybody had to have a contact manager on their desktop.

Enter the Age of Windows

Apple Macintosh and IBM PC dueled for supremacy. Meanwhile Bill Gates made money off both of them and along came the Internet Browser and its little buddy, the email browser. Equipped with address books tied to email addresses the savvy business tycoon of the 90s began collecting email addresses and building.  We got an early peek at which way things were going with the rise of Usenet, online bulletin boards and user groups. Limited to emails among people with similar interests, you could, however, share a few pictures, computer files and such with fellow users (we weren’t calling them friends yet). You might even sell each other things, call or send presents to friends if they shared their addresses or phone numbers with you. 

Enter the Age of Facebook

Then came MySpace and Facebook. Though there were some other similar social networks that quickly arose in and around the arrival of these two social networking pioneers, they were the primary duelists until MySpace’s attempts to be cool collapsed it under its own weight and more practical users fled to the faster, more sensible, less teenage girl ambience over at Facebook.

Originally designed to provide speedy links between friends in the queasily named “meat universe”, soon people began accumulating vast unwieldy lists of friends that strained even the mighty Facebook’s servers.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Firefox, and MSN/Bing provided new tools for finding your way around the ungodly piles information resting in servers connected to the World Wide Web. These have been quickly integrated into social media right and left. One search engine, the venerable Google, not satisfied with its dominance among search engines and e-mail hosting sites, has risen to challenge Facebook in the social networking arena. Despite some fans among the critics Google+ hasn’t drawn nearly the number away from Facebook it expected to and has since gone quietly defunct.

The Rise of the Mobile Communication Device

High tech companies find themselves scrambling to feed a new technology these days – the smart phone.  Along with tablets, laptops, eBook readers and PDAs, smart phones have taken the powerful communication tools of the past 2 decades and crammed them into your pocket in a device not much bigger and often rather smaller than the average wallet. Applications by the thousands for smart devices pour from the busy minds of huge corporate development teams and from lone entrepreneurs with some nifty ideas about what sorts of things people want to be able to do while sitting in a bus station or doctor’s waiting room. Some of their ideas have been brilliant and many have made nice potfuls of money for themselves. Authors are creating books without the benefit of traditional publishing houses (also without having to share the profits with them either). Many ambitious recording artists have made a surprisingly good living without a record contract by producing their own music and distributing it to their relatively small (by industry standards) fan bases.  On your iPhone or Android, you can even read or listen to a book or play music as well as take phone calls. As the capabilities and power supplies of these devices grow, it’s hard to imagine what else we’ll be able to do with our phones.

The Consequences

Social critics once wailed about the Internet, making dire predictions that society would collapse as we all withdrew from society and holed up in our basements with our soulless machines.  Actually, quite the opposite has happened. Excepting a few folk who would have wound up in their basements (or their mothers’ basements) anyway, the Internet has gone mobile as rapidly as possible. Rather than isolating us, the combination of cell phone technology married to the Internet, has led us to do what makes us human – we communicate.

Mike July of Internet Marketing & Web Design claims, “I’ve met a ton of cool people through Facebook and Twitter that I’d never have had the chance to encounter otherwise.” His experience is the same as many others.  Communities have gone from being based around geography - whoever happened to live within, first, walking, then driving distance, to whoever you share an interest with. Even the telephone hasn’t had the impact of the Internet. It took us a while to escape our geographic mindset.  Long distance was something special (and expensive).

Notice how in the past decade, free long distance has become more and more a standard feature of your telephone service as geographic bounds become less and less important. This is happening as we become less and less surprised that we can create friendships with people on the other side of the world from ourselves and maintain them. And it’s not just the lonely, spinster types that used to join pen pal clubs that are embracing relationships that ignore geography. People of all kinds are becoming clued in to the power of virtual friendships.

"Intuitive" Ain't What It Used to Be

Because these types of relationships have become the norm rather than rare and exclusive, the tools have been democratized.  As a result, we now have communication tools like the video phone (thanks to Skype, Facetime and other computer phone apps) that not only work very well, but don’t even cost anything to use unless you want the fancy add-ons.  Some of the tools like web connected PDAs, phones and portable computers, were barely even imagined in science fiction just 30 or 40 years ago.  Even Star Trek’s communicators which presaged the cell phone in form and function, didn’t get as far as the smartphone.  Kirk never was able to scan, photograph or analyze things with his communicator. He had to have a bulky tricorder for that.

The Implications for Us Geezers

Who knows how long, even those of us who were early adopters of the new communications technology will be able to keep up. Some of my friends avoid computers altogether and live in a primitive kind of cone of silence, isolated from the hubbub going on invisibly in the air around them. Others cut themselves off from the real world, choosing to bury their noses in Twitter conversations and social media.  Others, like me, tend to be at least one or two generations behind – embracing new tech only after it’s proven itself for a couple of years or a decade or so. My photo and desktop publishing software is over a decade old and I have no intention of upgrading until the price of the software drops drastically.  I used XP long past it’s sell-by date because I liked it and fine newer versions of Windows lead me into old dog/new tricks traps. Windows 11 frightens me a little and leaves me wondering how many expensive software programs I own  (the kind I actually know how to use) will be made obsolete my Bill Gates’ latest effort to make his yacht payment.

Increasingly, the new operating systems and protocols are designed for kids who grew up with computers and become steadily and inevitably less intuitive for us old geezers to master. The designers of these apps and devices have a different intuitive way of doing things than those of us who grew up with land-lines, reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and long-distance charges. What is intuitive for me, isn’t for Gen-Z, Millenials and Gen-Xers. They learned the language of digital tech organically – as they grew up playing with computers, cell phones and video games.

Perhaps, the purchasing power of the Baby Boom generation will either slow things down enough for us to keep up or induce hungry designers of communications tools to use the burgeoning technological capabilities at their disposal to take things back to an older, more human style interface.

So Far, Not So Good

Again, who knows? So far, all we Boomers have got out of the deal are cell phones with big buttons. I still want to take pictures and videos and surf the net. I just don’t want my phone to make me feel stupid because I can’t figure out what menu button makes the video camera work.

And don’t tell me Apple or Macs are easy to use. I’ve tried to figure out Macs and they are just every bit as confusing and I already learned to use a PC starting with a PC XT and DOS back in the 80s, so don’t confuse me by making me learn a new version every 3 years.

I am so doomed to obsolescence.

Just one man’s opinion,

Tom King
© 2012