10.30.09
How I Learned to Start Hating Anything and Stop Liking Nothing and What I Found On My Way to Before I Got There
Posted by: isquub
I despise iPhones. It's the heritage, really, I hate the whole family, I'm a lineagist. Goes back to iPods, which I hate. I hate the whole cult of mac.
My psychic landscape is littered with these things that I hate. It's a pretty clear case of old-fogie-ism. At least I think it is. Kids today probably have some new-fangled name for it. Gah.
Occasionally these horrible feelings for annoying new trendy things get replaced by numb acceptance; sometimes I even grow to like the things I used to hate and then conveniently forget I ever hated them. I'm pretty sure I used to have a problem with YouTube, or maybe bloggers who posted YouTube videos. I know I used to hate MySpace; now I've at least graduated to a sort of uncomfortable truce with that one.
I really hate FaceBook. I hated Twitter for a while and still hate most things about it, but I started using it for a while just to get a feel for it and that smoothed away some of the sharper edges of the hate. I'm pretty sure I will go to my grave hating "lolcats", and the re-branding of the word "fail" makes me want to beat the crap out of inanimate objects.
Cell phones are an example of something new-fangled that I never hated because I got on the bus before it became a bandwagon. There was a time when I was excited about owning a cell phone, back when most people didn't have them yet. I bought some bulky flip-phone with probably a one-line display from a regional provider. I probably still have the phone. I was moving and had a new job and thought it'd be a good thing to have. I have no memory whatever of ever using the thing, though I'm sure I must have. I think I may have ended up having problems with the service when in DC (where the job was), but I don't really remember that for sure. I've got some vague recollection of canceling the service and being stuck with the huge contract-fee which I may or may not have been able to get out of.
When I miss a bus, though: man. I hate the things that snowball when I'm not paying attention, the things that go from non-existent to ubiquitous while I'm in the bathroom.
I loved mp3 players when I first heard about them, and spent a long time wanting one. I couldn't justify buying one for a long time, though. By the time I was able to get one everyone was already talking about ipods like they were the second coming, and I was just baffled. "It's just an mp3 player!" I would've said if anyone would have asked.
Of course by that time also I wanted one that would play more than just mp3s, and so "digital audio player" made more sense. But everyone was busy appending "pod" to everything, and "podcast" was quickly entrenching itself in the language as a stand-in for anything you download and listen to that wasn't a song.
Why do we need to call it a podcast? Why can't it just be called a "downloadable audio file or collection of audio files that you can listen to on whatever suitable device you might have"? That seems like a much better name.
Some of the trends swept me up before I was old enough to realize how much better than everybody else I am. For example, I've never called anything a "portable tape player." I don't think I've ever owned a Sony portable tape player, but I've always called whatever version of that I've owned a walkman.
It's odd that sometimes those brand names somehow take over and stand-in for existing common words. What if we called cars Fords?
I think in some way the way that works feels like marketing gone mad to me. That's why I say I hate the cult of mac; it all smacks of marketing. Sort of like the debate about whether the tea baggers are a grass-roots movement or an astroturf movement. "Mac" is accurate - when we talk about Mac we are talking about a specific brand of a specific thing. With Microsoft sort of the mirror-image problem happened; the term "PC" has been (semi-successfully) rebranded as a stand-in for any personal computer running a version of Windows, leaving machines running any other operating system out in the cold having to call itself a "linux machine" or "computer running a Sun Operating System." As if when we said a "car" we were only talking about Fords, and everything else would have to be called something different. But from there the cult of mac went nuts, and iPod became what everyone called a portable digital audio player, and with iPhone it's gone even further and people seem to think iPhones are a whole new species of device. In fact of course cell phones that do more than just make and receive phone calls have been around for a while and pre-date iPhones. Someone was calling them "smart phones" for a while, but with the advent of the iPhone now it feels like everyone is having a branding war, with lots of people calling everything a blackberry while other companies try to use their own product name to compete.
My hatred of iPhones goes beyond the name, though, to the point that most of that in this case is almost irrelevant. I had a smart phone a few years ago (and blogged from it sometimes) and thought it was a pretty cool device as far as being able to access the internet via wi-fi without having a laptop with me. It did some other neat stuff, too; but it was a horrible, horrible phone. It was a rectangular block, and it was clearly not ergonomically designed to be used as a phone. The call quality wasn't great, and a lot of that seemed to be related to that inconvenient shape. iPhones continue that trend. I rarely (if ever) hear any discussion of their functionality as phones. I sure hear a lot about how they have "apps", though (speaking of rebranding.)
And it's a tissue, not a "Kleenex," goddammit.
My psychic landscape is littered with these things that I hate. It's a pretty clear case of old-fogie-ism. At least I think it is. Kids today probably have some new-fangled name for it. Gah.
Occasionally these horrible feelings for annoying new trendy things get replaced by numb acceptance; sometimes I even grow to like the things I used to hate and then conveniently forget I ever hated them. I'm pretty sure I used to have a problem with YouTube, or maybe bloggers who posted YouTube videos. I know I used to hate MySpace; now I've at least graduated to a sort of uncomfortable truce with that one.
I really hate FaceBook. I hated Twitter for a while and still hate most things about it, but I started using it for a while just to get a feel for it and that smoothed away some of the sharper edges of the hate. I'm pretty sure I will go to my grave hating "lolcats", and the re-branding of the word "fail" makes me want to beat the crap out of inanimate objects.
Cell phones are an example of something new-fangled that I never hated because I got on the bus before it became a bandwagon. There was a time when I was excited about owning a cell phone, back when most people didn't have them yet. I bought some bulky flip-phone with probably a one-line display from a regional provider. I probably still have the phone. I was moving and had a new job and thought it'd be a good thing to have. I have no memory whatever of ever using the thing, though I'm sure I must have. I think I may have ended up having problems with the service when in DC (where the job was), but I don't really remember that for sure. I've got some vague recollection of canceling the service and being stuck with the huge contract-fee which I may or may not have been able to get out of.
When I miss a bus, though: man. I hate the things that snowball when I'm not paying attention, the things that go from non-existent to ubiquitous while I'm in the bathroom.
I loved mp3 players when I first heard about them, and spent a long time wanting one. I couldn't justify buying one for a long time, though. By the time I was able to get one everyone was already talking about ipods like they were the second coming, and I was just baffled. "It's just an mp3 player!" I would've said if anyone would have asked.
Of course by that time also I wanted one that would play more than just mp3s, and so "digital audio player" made more sense. But everyone was busy appending "pod" to everything, and "podcast" was quickly entrenching itself in the language as a stand-in for anything you download and listen to that wasn't a song.
Why do we need to call it a podcast? Why can't it just be called a "downloadable audio file or collection of audio files that you can listen to on whatever suitable device you might have"? That seems like a much better name.
Some of the trends swept me up before I was old enough to realize how much better than everybody else I am. For example, I've never called anything a "portable tape player." I don't think I've ever owned a Sony portable tape player, but I've always called whatever version of that I've owned a walkman.
It's odd that sometimes those brand names somehow take over and stand-in for existing common words. What if we called cars Fords?
I think in some way the way that works feels like marketing gone mad to me. That's why I say I hate the cult of mac; it all smacks of marketing. Sort of like the debate about whether the tea baggers are a grass-roots movement or an astroturf movement. "Mac" is accurate - when we talk about Mac we are talking about a specific brand of a specific thing. With Microsoft sort of the mirror-image problem happened; the term "PC" has been (semi-successfully) rebranded as a stand-in for any personal computer running a version of Windows, leaving machines running any other operating system out in the cold having to call itself a "linux machine" or "computer running a Sun Operating System." As if when we said a "car" we were only talking about Fords, and everything else would have to be called something different. But from there the cult of mac went nuts, and iPod became what everyone called a portable digital audio player, and with iPhone it's gone even further and people seem to think iPhones are a whole new species of device. In fact of course cell phones that do more than just make and receive phone calls have been around for a while and pre-date iPhones. Someone was calling them "smart phones" for a while, but with the advent of the iPhone now it feels like everyone is having a branding war, with lots of people calling everything a blackberry while other companies try to use their own product name to compete.
My hatred of iPhones goes beyond the name, though, to the point that most of that in this case is almost irrelevant. I had a smart phone a few years ago (and blogged from it sometimes) and thought it was a pretty cool device as far as being able to access the internet via wi-fi without having a laptop with me. It did some other neat stuff, too; but it was a horrible, horrible phone. It was a rectangular block, and it was clearly not ergonomically designed to be used as a phone. The call quality wasn't great, and a lot of that seemed to be related to that inconvenient shape. iPhones continue that trend. I rarely (if ever) hear any discussion of their functionality as phones. I sure hear a lot about how they have "apps", though (speaking of rebranding.)
And it's a tissue, not a "Kleenex," goddammit.
Apertome wrote: