05-12-2020, 11:47 PM
(05-12-2020, 06:57 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: The idea that smartphones are a fad is to misunderstand what they are. Horseless carriages, moving pictures, talking pictures and the tee-vee were all once called fads too. Of those only one actually proved to be a fad--the tee-vee--but only because we have superior methods of doing the same thing with more multipurpose technology. Seriously, were it not for my Boomer mother we wouldn't even have a tee-vee in the house (excluding the ones connected to a gaming console).
It's here to stay until something surpasses it. What surprises me that it isn't built into laptop computers to take advantage of the larger display for data. So instead of "wshakespeare1564" having to press strokes that read "ebrowning 1806" to send e-mail, "wshakespeare1564" writes his sonnet and dials the phone number for "ebrowning1806" and sends it, reciprocating with her own sonnet. As with television we have improvements of not only the television receiver and an astonishing cutting of price but also improved means of transmitting TV signals. When TV was VHF only, many people where I live were buying TV's from people in Fort Wayne, Indiana where signals from Indianapolis, Dayton, and Toledo didn't quite reach... so nothing did. That's over.
It may not be so much that the smart phone is adopting great new technologies but instead that institutions adapt to it. With the appropriate ap one can read a check and get the money represented deposited in one's account. But television did much the same thing as a standard. The smart phone can do much that a television can do -- except, of course, play a feature film on a screen of adequate size. I would love some day to play movies of about eighty years ago on a giant TV screen as if I were in a theater.
I am using what is basically a TV screen for reading what people post on the Web. I just wish that I had a touch screen so that I could offer some macabre anti-Trump propaganda... you don't want to know what I substitute for the zero's in "2020".
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.