Sit up straight and pay attention

Two cracking articles on our need for stimulation, searching and satisfaction – and what our use of  t’internet does for/to us.

Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter and texting. And why that’s dangerous. By Emily Yoffe in Slate

Is Google making us stupid? by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic

Advertisement

iphone H2G2 fubar: PANIC!!!

Joe’s iphone, reconditioned, is having a problem. It shuts itself down – rebooting style – at the slightest effort. iPhone response? PANIC…

I’m in (iPhone) heaven

Picking up hotel wifi connections, taking decent quality pictures which can then be sent straight to flickr, playing me my ‘get by in spanish’ course, playing random tunes from it’s surprisingly dcent quality speaker and… my favourite new thing: I can record audio in decent enough quality using the iTalk app.

Last night recorded a xylopohne band, some traditional music, and a 10-man street party band. 

De Botton’s point, echoing Ruskin, in Art of Travel is that we should not so much seek to possess the beauty and the experience of travel by relinquishing all our attentive capabilities to modern technology – and i totally agree. In my photography I have always tried to capture just enough of the feeling of a moment or a place so that it will act as a fulfilling psychological prompt.

But the beauty of this one device is that it has just given me a new way, through audio, to retain the experience and re-live it at a later date.

I took heed of Mr Fry’s advice but have no need of a laptop. And forgetting the charger for my camera is, in a way, a godsend as it forces me to be even more economical with time and my attempts to capture experience.

There are problems of course – the processor just isn’t powerful enough to handle this blog page – and so i have to revert to the “tradition” of the net cafe – for example. But for now, it’s a blessing.