Boing Boing's Maggie Koerth-Baker discusses Thomas Hayden's essay on "crap technology" and brings up a good point: What makes "crap" crap? Koerth-Baker and Hayden fondly discuss their mp3 players of choice - a Sansa Clip and a Coby, respectively - and I thought of my own Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (left). A gift from Christmas 2003, I still have it - I use it regularly, in fact. It's my go-to music source when I'm working in my closet-office, mostly because it has most of my music collection on it. My iPod Nano, also from the pre-touch screen epoch, can only hold 8GB of music - I use it for workouts if for some reason Spotify doesn't have a particular album or I want something less high-maintenance than Pandora.
I finally upgraded to a smartphone this year. While it's not an iPhone, the LG Optimus S is light-years ahead of my old flip-phone - it felt like I'd finally joined the 21st century. I think holding off on such a purchase has made me appreciate this technology more, and while it sometimes freezes or takes its sweet time loading an app, it still does everything I need it to do. I might be more patient with the slow crawl of old gizmos, since I only just quasi-replaced my 6-year-old Apple PowerBook G4 (which I also still occasionally use) with an iPad. Dazzling new features are even more dazzling if you've waited half a decade for an upgrade. Feature creep? More like feature warp speed.
My own pet theory: Is it possible that the quest for self-improvement has been replaced in our culture by the desire for shiny objects? Instead of striving to be better people, perhaps we've shifted our focus to striving to have better material things. It's certainly quicker, if you have the means, but ultimately less satisfying... and then you end up with clutter. But that's another post.
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