The way we watch

I love my iPod but it requires me to keep one thumbnail long in the manner of bus conductors who collect fares and hand out change. It’s almost four years old, with the wheel control and the small screen. If you listen to music with this first-generation video iPod in your pocket or bag, and the wheel moves — which always happens — the volume gets turned up, blasting your eardrums, or turned down so you don’t hear the music. That’s annoying. To prevent this from happening you have to shift the “Hold” lock on top of the unit. Its edge is so thin you need to have a longish fingernail to shift it, and if you’re in the habit of cutting your nails very short, it’s a pain.

This problem no longer exists with the new iPod Touch, which automatically “locks” itself after a minute or so. If you want to change the volume setting or music, you click on the button and a lock appears on the touch screen. You shift the lock and voila. Oh right, I haven’t mentioned that it’s a touch screen music player. Everything is touch screen now, especially cell phones. My friend Stella points out that her Palm Treo has a touch screen and it’s three years old, so big deal.

The iPod Touch is 11cm long and 6m wide, slightly longer than the older iPods, and its screen is twice as big. It automatically shifts from portrait to landscape orientation when you tilt it. By clicking the “i” on the screen you access track titles and running time. Drag a finger across the screen and you can flip through all the contents of your library, press on a title and that song or video plays. It’s all very cool and easy, but how much effort does it really take to click on a title?

And what are you going to do with all the effort you save by not clicking, rewrite Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”?

Is new technology making humans lazy?

The other major development in the iPod Touch is that it can surf the Internet. With a Wi-Fi connection you can check your email, go to YouTube, and download music, videos, and applications. It’s like an iPhone that doesn’t make phone calls.

If you only use your computer for checking your email and visiting your favorite websites (i.e. if you’re a person of leisure) you might consider replacing it with an iPod Touch. The virtual keyboard is larger than that of most cellphones, and once you get used to the keys, typing is easy.

When the video iPod first came out, we all said, “Naah, I’m not going to watch movies on a tiny screen. Cinema is a communal experience. You need to see movies on a screen at least twenty feet high, in a dark theater, with the option to eat popcorn and yell at the people who take calls during the movie.”

I still go to the cinema regularly, but I notice that fewer and fewer people do — unless it’s an “event” movie that draws the crowds. Sometimes I am literally alone in the theater. In the afternoons my fellow moviegoers are mostly retired senior citizens. Theater attendance picks up on weekends, but moviegoing is not what it used to be. There are too many cheaper, more convenient alternatives.

You can watch movies on a DVD player or a computer screen. If you don’t fly into a rage over incorrect aspect ratios, you can watch movies on an iPod or cell phone. For its Xperia launch, Sony-Ericsson handed out memory sticks which contained the Will Smith feature film Hancock. It’s weird watching a superhero movie on a phone, but one gets used to it. As one gets used to pretty much everything.

You know how extraterrestrials — Zeta Reticulans — are often represented as bipeds with large heads, big eyes, thin bodies, long fingers with large padded tips? Is that the next stage of human evolution? With developments in technology, there’s less and less physical activity required of us — we use our eyes to look at screens, our brains to process vast amounts of information, and our fingers to point, scroll, and click. So our eyes, heads, fingers grow, the rest of us shrink.

When we’re able to control machines telekinetically, with mind-machine interfaces, we could be on our way to becoming brains floating in jars.

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