Smartmobs response

Reingold’s article struck a particular chord with me, as I am what some might call a stick in the mud, despite being from what it generally considered a technological generation. In particular, I’ve only begun to use texting as a communication method this past year, and frankly speaking I still prefer a phone call. One impetus to the change was that my mother had begun sending texts to me and my siblings, and frankly speaking it seems weird for her to be more up on technological trends than I am. Even more than that though is the fact that for some reason most of the people I try to communicate with respond better to texts than phone calls, an oddity I’m still at a complete loss to explain. To tie it back into the article, I needed to change the way I do things so as not to be swept away by the current of new technologies. Sticking to my old ways was no longer able to cut the mustard of the future.

The second thing to take away is the discussion of technology being lauded for the sake of being new. I can’t for the life of me remember which device in particular it is, but roughly half a year ago there was an announcement for a new technology tool to allow people to read downloaded books in a surprisingly book-like manner, even having an easy page turn option and all. This leads to the question: what’s wrong with using a book? Essentially this device was a new way to do something that people have been able to do for some time now. It ties in to the critique of “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video that posited that these new technologies were simply seeking to emulate traditional speech. In this case, rather than accomplishing something new the device was trying to emulate the way we read books, which isn’t really that helpful since we still have books.