10th
Too much technology.
Just a few minutes ago I waited on a woman who had been browsing in the bookstore for almost an hour. She bought a couple of cookbooks and asked for directions to the knitting store and, overall, seemed like a pleasant person. Through our whole (small) interaction, though, something was unsettling about her.
It was only when she turned her head to the side and I got a look at her profile that I realized what it was. She had her bluetooth headset on and had, apparently, been wearing it the whole time she was in the store. She hadn’t spoken to anyone while she was browsing—hadn’t made a single phone call.
There was another woman yesterday who was doing the same thing. It is really a weird, uncomfortable thing to see someone hooked up to their technology for long periods of time. This phenomenon began to manifest itself in the iPod—I remember walking down Market Street about a year ago and seeing everyone (everyone!) with little white headphones screwed in.
It makes me worried that we in the United States are perhaps a little too attached to our gadgets. Don’t get me wrong, I love iPods and personal computers and cell phones. They are useful and innovative and I know that the industrialized world would be very different without them. But I can’t help but ask if we are maybe going too far. The bluetooth headsets in particular give me the willies. They remind me of cyborgs from Star Trek. Do we really want to be cyborgs, tapped into a buzzing machine all the time?
One new invention that really makes me worry is the Kindle, the next in what I am sure will be a large line of e-book tools. I hate this idea. I know that it has a lot going for it convenience-wise (it can hold a ridiculous amount of text, which is definitely better for most people than lugging around a bunch of books), but it bothers me to think that the book may become extinct. Think about it—how much does the actual format and feel of a book (its smell, weight, the softness of its pages, the font, the printing irregularities) influence a reader’s feelings about the work? For me, at least, the book itself is as important as the printed matter inside it. I cannot imagine how sterile my house would be if all of my books were compressed into a small electronic device. I hate it, and I hate the idea that a bookstore may, in the future, be more like an Apple store than a shelf-lined, chaotic paper emporium.
