In the beginning, there were megaphones. These megaphones were expensive, and hard to use, so the only people who used them were ones who knew how, and could afford them. Over time, the megaphones got cheaper, and easier to use. So, more people got megaphones. The cheaper ones weren’t quite as loud as the expensive, fancy ones, but they were often loud enough. Not everybody could afford a megaphone, and fewer still knew how to use the cheaper ones, of course. Sure enough, though, they found a way to make cheaper, easier to use megaphones that were louder than the second batch.
And so on, and so on, and so on, until now almost everyone who wants a megaphone has one. The new megaphones are almost as loud as the fanciest, most expensive megaphones, and they’re easy enough to use that some people only ever use their megaphone to communicate. Naturally, this makes things very chaotic, loud, and bothersome. To make matters worse, not only the megaphones are pretty easy to use, but they’re easy to misuse too. And nobody’s read the damn manual, if they even came with one. And more people are getting megaphones every day.
Of course, not everyone has a megaphone, but a lot of people do. Until fairly recently, the only people with megaphones were either big companies who could afford the biggest, loudest, and most complicated megaphones, or early-adopter type people who had the cheaper, almost-as-loud ones. There were just enough people with megaphones that it wasn’t overwhelming, but progress marches on. While those of us who have had megaphones for years are trying to figure out how to handle a noisy world with lots of echoing feedback, the people who haven’t had megaphones are anxious to jump in.
To make matters more complicated, a lot of the people picking up megaphones have seen us using ours in public view. They’re used to just hearing our amplified voices, and not being heard over the din. Now they have an even footing. Their megaphone is as loud as ours, and all the other new people with megaphones can listen to anyone, or amplify what either person says. No wonder it’s so noisy. So the old megaphone users aren’t happy with all the noise, and they aren’t happy with how the new people are using their megaphones, and fights are breaking out.
And that’s where we are today.
The thing is, none of us know how to use our megaphones. Some of us think we’ve got it all figured out, since we’ve been using them for so long. Then those upstarts come up and starting using their megaphones differently, for different reasons. Even if they’re not directing their megaphones at us, it’s annoying. Thing is, they’re going through the same learning process we did when we got megaphones. Not only are these new megaphone users learning the ins and outs of megaphone etiquette, they’re learning it in a different environment than we, the early-adopters did. There weren’t many rules when we picked up our first megaphone—we made them up as we learned, and what we made were rules that fit a world where fewer people had megaphones. As the new megaphone users learn how to use them, we’re being forced to adapt how we use our megaphones to the louder world, and that’s hard to do.
We’ll probably never agree 100% on how we should use our megaphones. Time will sort out most of it, until the next batch of people get newer, cheaper megaphones, and the cycle will begin again.
Those who thrive off social contact will love a wearable, but those already overwhelmed by Facebook and texting will find it tears at their solitude and sense of self. Both will be, in part, right. The device may be new, but those hopes and fears are old.
The whole piece is an interesting read about the role watches have played in culture. (Funny how wristwatches were originally a “feminine” thing, considering how the smart watch is so masculinized through its size.) I highlight the end of it here, because it encapsulates a big chunk of my skepticism.
The platonic ideal of wearable computing is omnipresence. At least I can put my phone in a drawer or on its dock on my desk. Once the battery problem is licked, and I have a communications device physically strapped to my body almost all the time, what happens then?
As a slightly belated birthday gift, I got a Jawbone UP Move from my girlfriend. And lost it within 36 hours. In those 36 hours, I was so taken by the Jawbone UP ecosystem that as soon as I had the chance to get to a store, I bought a replacement. Yes, fitness trackers are largely hype. No, this isn’t my first dalliance with trackers. I started 2014 with a FitBit One, lost that inside of a day, and bought a replacement that I lost five months later. I’ve used fitness tracking apps on my iPhone, despite ongoing issues with Health.app that I only solved by nuking and repaving my iPhone.
I decided to get a tracker because it reduces some of the failure points in getting a sense of my activity. Since the UP Move is a very basic clip-on tracker that runs on a watch battery, the main point of failure is losing the stupid thing. Again. Considering the flakiness in using my phone as a fitness tracker, this seemed a smart investment. What I like most about the UP Move is that is does not try to be much more than it is. As fitness trackers go, it is the most basic, bare-bones device one can get. It tracks steps, it tracks sleep. That’s it. All the really fancy stuff happens in the app ecosystem, and I can’t imagine that logging my lunch on a 1.5″ screen is going to be much fun.
The basic fitness tracker is far more compelling to me than a “smart watch†because of its simplicity and focus. Nobody has articulated exactly why I would need a screen on my wrist, and the benefits it would give me over just taking a phone out of my pocket. Apple, as I mentioned in September, has come the closest to articulating it, but I’m still not convinced this is something I need. My life, and the way I use my devices, mitigates the need to have something buzzing on my wrist for something important. I’ve set up my phone to only buzz if it’s something worthy of distracting me. We’re already going to have to curate the crap that gets sent to our little wrist-buzzing screens. I’ve skipped a step and curated it before it even hits the phone.
As the Apple Watch launch grows near, and as more companies enter the smart watch space, bringing new ideas and interfaces, I’m maintaining cautious optimism that someone, probably Apple, will make exactly the right case for a device I can wear on my wrist to solve some problem I didn’t even know I had. Until that time, the problems I have are already solved by existing, and cheaper solutions. Too many buzzing and beeping notifications on my phone? Turn them off. Needing to know how much I move and how well I sleep? I have a fitness tracker. Need to know what time it is? I have a plain, ordinary wristwatch—one I also clip my UP Move to and so I don’t need to spend the extra sixteen bucks on a rubber wristband for sleep tracking.
These things are the right solution for somebody. Patrick Rhone is huge on personal fitness, and sees the Apple Watch as a perfect replacement for a runner’s GPS watch, and more. Andy Ihnatko has been singing the praises of the Moto 360 for months, and it works well with his lifestyle of regular travel. That’s two use cases right there. The case has been articulated for both of them, and it’s been articulated for others. It’s all just plain overkill for me. Until either my life changes to the point where a smart watch makes sense, or a smart watch maker articulates a use case that makes sense for me where I am, I’ll stick with what I’ve got.
A lot of us haven’t thought of this because companies haven’t often exercised their right to remove content for licensing or contract violations. But the stories are getting more numerous: In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of two Orwell e-books from customers’ Kindles without notice, based on its licensing terms. In 2012, an IT consultant in Norway had her Kindle e-books wiped and her Amazon account closed for nonspecified violations to Kindle’s terms of service. And, in December, a California court finally heard a class-action lawsuit brought by several Californians against Apple, claiming that Apple deleted their non-iTunes music that owners had downloaded from competing music services from 2007 to 2009. All of these actions were based on the licensing terms of the specific e-media. If these actions continue, the public will be at the mercy of the content industries and those industries’ reliance on consumer ignorance about e-media ownership.
At least in the world of music, the mass de-adoption of DRM means that when you buy something from iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store, you do own that file. For everything else, the tendrils of DRM reach deep into our libraries and we do not own anything. This should worry us—it even worries me despite being neck-deep in the Kindle ebook ecosystem.
Here’s the thing: this has nothing to do with preventing piracy, and it has everything to do with getting people to pay multiple times for the same media. And until people understand this, they’ll continue to roll over for the media companies.
(This is not to excuse piracy which does rob creators of their rightful pay, but DRM sure makes it a reasonable-seeming alternative.)
However, the “cashless society†is an idea that people have been batting around since before the ATM even and, as yet, it hasn’t happened; a number of industry analysts and academics don’t think it will (no matter how much safer it may make America, according to a March 2014 article in The Atlantic correlating decreased cash use with decreased crime). Stearns, who studies the sociological implications of payment in society, noted that cash-based interactions still have power in America, such as dropping a coin in homeless person’s cup, adding your tithe to the collection plate at church, or tipping the valet who parks your car.
Fascinating, but until I can walk into any bodega, bar, coffee shop, or dollar slice joint in New York City and pay for my stuff with a card (or Apple Pay) the ATM will be a part of my life. The number of places in this city that still deal with cash as the primary, or even only way of making a transaction is staggering. They’ll also be among the last to switch to any sort of digital payments, because there’s no transaction cost to doing business in cash. In that low-margin world, those fees add up.