Apps ahoy! (One of these days, almost for sure)

No, I didn't take this picture. Even if I knew how to take pictures with the thing, I could hardly have taken a picture of it, could I?


"[M]aybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous. For all these reasons I quit Facebook about two months after I'd joined it. As with all seriously addictive things, giving up proved to be immeasurably harder than starting. I kept changing my mind: Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I've ever had, and I loved it for that. I think a lot of people love it for that. Some work-avoidance techniques are onerous in themselves and don't make time move especially quickly: smoking, eating, calling people up on the phone. With Facebook hours, afternoons, entire days went by without my noticing."

-- Zadie Smith, in a November 2010 New York Review
of Books essay, "Generation Why?"

"[O]n Twitter you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time."

-- Margaret Atwood, in a new NYRB blogpost,
"Deeper into the Twungle"

by Ken

I just dug up the New York Review of Books piece that contains the above quote from the almost-always-stimulating Zadie Smith. It's an essay that took as its jumping-off points the Aaron Sorkin-David Fincher film The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. The quote, once found, turned out to be very much as I remembered it. What surprised me is what a small portion of the piece this quote represents.

Somehow I had forgotten how generally, and even alarmedly, negative Smith (left) was in the piece with regard to Facebook and the kind of social, or antisocial, mindset it embodies. I can see now that this didn't surprise me back in November 2010. Probably what surprised me then was learning that she had actually been through a period of Facebook addiction. From my own experience, I just couldn't understand how this was even possible, not for someone with such seemingly strong connections to nonvirtual reality as Smith.

I had recently come through a brief period of trying, at the recommendation of (once-trusted) friends who assured me that Facebook would open a new world to me, to find some reason -- any reason -- for hanging out on Facebook. I was never able to figure out how or why anybody would spend more time there than the couple of minutes it takes to whiz through the latest maunderings posted by the person's "friends."

I still can't figure it out. Even now, I keep receiving regular e-mails from Facebook claiming that I have new "notifications," which always turns out to be a lie. The first couple of times I went scrounging all around the damned site in search of these new notifications, until I found a screen that told me in no uncertain terms that I had no new notifications. That at least relieved my anxiety that I was missing some desperately important communication. Now when I get one of those fib-mails, I do sometimes check into my account, just to peek at the graffiti scrawled over my "wall." I've accepted a bunch of "friend" invitations, if only out of politeness, and some of these are people I actually wouldn't mind hearing from, or at least about. Every now and then I pick up a scrap of information, like the death of a parent or the birth of a new grandchild. I've never timed it, but I think I usually get in and out of the site in two or three minutes.

I SHOULD EXPLAIN THAT TWO OR THREE (MAYBE FOUR)
WEEKS AGO TODAY MY SMARTPHONE WAS DELIVERED

Partly I can't remember how many weeks it was (I just remember it was a Monday, because I wasn't expecting it to arrive till maybe Wednesday) because after the couple of days it took to get the thing activated and straighten out a number of details with my provider in order to get my online account set up, I haven't so much as turned it on.

I admit, I'm a-scared of it. I don't know how to do a darned thing with it, and it scares me to be that clueless. Now, I'm not constitutionally technophobic. There was a time, notably when I was first making my way in the computer world, when few things gave me more pleasure than ripping open the package of a new item of hardware or softward and attacking the manual to get the thing up and running and teach myself how to manage at least its basic functions.

No more. Somewhere along the line I lost confidence in my ability to make head or tail of the manual. This goes back at least to the time I boldly ordered a SCSI card to expand my fairly primitive Mac, so that I could have such unimagined newfangled devices as a CD-ROM drive, and was so intimidated by all the intricacies I had heard and read about that I don't think I ever even opened the package. (I outwaited myself. Eventually I bought a new computer that had all that stuff taken care of internally.)

At the moment somewhere in my apartment I've got the package containing the Elements of Photoshop software I ordered sitting safely (I assume). Even if I found a window of courage for installing it, I would first have to find the package.

With regard to the smartphone, I've written before about my resistance to this whole world of "apps." But I faced a decision. I literally wasn't using my old dumbphone at all, partly because it wasn't working so well anymore, and would have had to be replaced if I hoped to get any use out of it, but also because I just didn't seem to have any use for it, with the exception of when I was traveling, when it was a fabulous thing to have -- but I hardly ever travel. I really only broke down and got the damned thing because there came a moment during my mother's long decline, 1500 miles away, when I simply had to have a way to be in regular contact with her onsite caregivers. (I was being hassled at work for using my office phone.)

It's now more than two years since my mother died, though, and for month on end my "usage" month after month was zero. Not zero above my allotted minutes, but zero. Not a great return on my montly $50-plus investment. I faced the choice, it seemed to me, especially with my phone itself in need of replacing, of either down- or upgrading -- either giving the thing up altogether or seeing how much it would cost to upgrade to smarphone service and see if I might actually use it.

Before my phone even arrived, I had found and downloaded the manual, and then printed the whole 200 pages out. And then carried them around in an envelope back and forth between home and work every day, hardly daring to peek inside.

I thought, as last weekend approached, during which I would be doing three walking tours and might well want to write something about them, that this would be a great time to figure out how to use the camera function. (My poor old dumbphone took pictures, but I never found a way of extracting them from the device.) In the days preceding I kept thinking this would be a good time to crack open that printout of the manual. No go.

Even when I set out on Saturday morning, I had with me both the envelope containing the printout and, safely tucked I away (I hoped), the contraption itself. I had about a 45-minute ride on the M100 bus to the meeting point for my Municipal Art Society walk from Harlem into the Mott Haven area of the Bronx. I found other occupations to fill that time. As I wrote here, I had about a 50-minute subway ride from the Bronx to the Park Slope area of Brooklyn for my MAS walking tour there. Again, I found other ways to fill the time.

It's true that much of the time from my return home Saturday to my departure for my Sunday MAS walking tour of Downtown Brooklyn was filled with work on my Sunday Classics post, but I could still have cracked open the smartphone manual on the subway ride to Brooklyn. But I didn't. I did wind up writing a post, but had no pictures of my own to add to it.

The reason I'm going into all this just now is that not long before I started writing this post I stumbled across the new NYRB blogpost by Margaret Atwood from which the second quote at the top is taken. Here's a little more of what the distinguished writer -- not a grand passion of mine, but someone I certainly take seriously -- has to say:

[On] Twitter you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time. You might even find yourself climbing the odd tree -- the very odd tree -- or taking refuge in the odd hollow log -- the very odd hollow log -- because cute bunnies and playful kittens are not the only things alive in the mirkwoods of the Web. Or the webs of the mirkwoods. Paths can get tangled there. Plots can get thickened. Games are afoot.

When I first started Twittering, back in 2009 -- you can read about my early adventures in a NYRblog post I wrote two years ago -- I was, you might say, merely capering on the flower-bestrewn fringes of the Twitterwoods. . . .

[Editor's note: The above photo of Ms. A appeared with the 2009 NYRB blogpost she cites, which was titled "Atwood in the Twittersphere." The 2009 caption read: "Margaret Atwood, tweeting aboard the Queen Mary 2, August 2009."]

Really? "You can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time"? Huh? Like where? Hey, I yield to pretty much no one in my ability to woolgather and timewaste, but I do have my limits.

As it happens, I was recently exhorted by yet another once-trusted friend on the subject of the usefulness of Twitter. (I won't name him, but he knows who he is, and you know him too.) To the point where, with no little trepidation, I signed myself up, and in the process was forced to choose 15 or 20 people or things to "follow." My once-trusted friend had assured me that if indeed I found, as I put it to him, that I was being swamped with urgent news like somebody having just made a sandwich, I could just ditch such tweeters, as he does frequently when people he follows devote too much attention to subjects like sports.

Since I signed up, I've only ventured back onto the site a few times. Talk about useless! What I found there hasn't encouraged frequent return visits. I suppose I could be devoting time to rooting out the rot and hunting down more informative or entertaining sources. Maybe I'll put that on my "to do" list.

First, though, I'm going to have to turn my phone again. I'm too cheap to be shelling out what I'm going to be shelling out each month (I've paid my first bill but because of the extra stuff it included I'll need to wait for the next one to see what the actual monthly total will be with all taxes and fees added) for something I don't use at all, and I'm way too cheap to even consider shelling out those big contract-buy-out bucks.

I guess one of these days I should start trying to figure out which apps might actually do something for me. I don't suppose anyone has any useful suggestions.

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