Gadgets such as Apple's iPad 2 don't remove problems from our lives, they only replace them with new ones
I look at the publicity for iPad 2 and am oddly unmoved. I've watched my friends with iPads either have an elaborate conversion experience or become strangely grumpy. People who never fell in love with Apple products before suddenly announce that they have got an Electric Friend that's Fun to Be With; it says in the advertising that You Already Know How to Use It, and that is just how they experience it. The only thing that could possibly threaten their devotion is the thought that iPad 2 might be even better, or possibly iPad 3 in a year or so's time.
I remember when I decided to get my first mobile phone. I was standing with a friend at a media party. Around us, people were checking messages and talking to not currently visible friends while sipping drinks, and it occurred to us almost simultaneously that things had changed. Once mobiles had been bricks carried by annoying yuppies; then they became shiny things owned by techie friends. Now they were about to move from being cool into being essential ? within a week we both had them, and one of the first things we did was call each other and get an engaged signal.
The British were early adopters, comparatively, which meant that there was a period at the end of last century when we watched American television shows and giggled. Mulder and Scully, or Buffy and Xander, were so often in jeopardy that being able to ring each other up, and warn each other, about vampires or aliens would have made the plots impossible. In everyday life, mobile phones made a lot of the standard farce of emotional life unlikely too ? gone were the days when you could just keep missing someone and never got to explain or excuse or apologise for some terrible gaffe. Great loves of one's life were lost over such things, whereas now, in an era of easy communication, desperate quarrels happen over forgetting to turn your phone off silent after a movie, or sending a text to the wrong person.
Gadgets don't remove the existence of problems from our lives, they only replace certain problems with other ones. I love that I can listen to Bach toccatas on my phone, but sometimes technology brings new and hitherto unimagined frustrations ? it drives me mad that my phone is oddly crap at updating Twitter, which was not a problem when I got it, because Twitter did not exist. Every few years I feel like not getting any more gadgets, any more complications to my life, and I know that this is not just a symptom of middle age ? and every few years, if I happen to have any money, that feeling goes away.
Some people got rid of their iPad in days, took it back to the shop or gave it to a friend they only quite liked. You question them about this and they talk like disappointed suitors ? it did something that was almost what they wanted, but didn't do it quite as they wanted ? it wouldn't count, say, the words in their copy without the purchase of yet another app.
I look at my finances and somehow I am more likely to listen to the disappointed than the enthusiastic, but who can say how I would react if something shiny arrived on my doorstep with a sign saying "take care of my poor dear"? For all of us, save a few Luddites, gadgets are a triumph of hope over regret ? this or that object of desire disappointed, but somehow out there is the gadget, as there is the lover, of our dreams, who will not disappoint and anticipate our whims.
The Luddites have a point ? there is something slightly obscene about the way we perpetually upgrade. Rare minerals, stained in the blood of local conflicts, are used to give us more kit with which to talk about medical soaps with friends in Korea or swap high-definition photos of cute cats. We are just that used to having the privilege to broadcast our liberal guilt and there may well be no hope for us.
Old gadgets stutter into half-life when we are done with them. Sometimes we recycle them and then worry that someone has managed to unwipe that embarrassing party video; more often they sit in a corner of a spare room, gathering dust and losing associations. The other day, I found some floppies left me by a friend a decade dead ? letters, poems ? and realised that I no longer had a drive or a programme that could read them. Gadgets brighten our lives, but sometimes they just help us to forget.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/25/ipad-2-gadgets
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