I have been waiting to upgrade from my iPhone 4S to something notably better. That moment arrives with the appearance of the iPhone 5S and its fancy new operating system and fingerprint technology.
It turns out that I can trade in my two-year old iPhone 4S for £175 or so, ie rather more than it costs to buy the new 5S on exactly the same contract for minutes and data. Win! So, that's what I've done.
It's impressive if not eerie to see how swiftly the new phone uploads everything from my old one via iTunes, down to the same configuration of apps and the data within them (such as my business expenses app and my monthly car mileage total for this September). I popped in the new micro-SIM card and within a couple of minutes my old phone had stopped taking calls and the new one was working on my existing phone number. Well done Orange/EE and Apple.
The new operating system looks a bit over-designed and 'weedy' somehow, but we'll all get used to it. The iPhone 5 is superbly built and very light, and the latest improvements in how one gets at different parts of it (such as quickly switching on aircraft mode or finding the Search facility) are excellent. Photos and apps all look even sharper. The new camera works like a dream as you scroll through different functions. And so on.
The problem? Only that devices like these and all the Android/Kindle or whatever competitors are changing our brains, mainly for the worse. This magnificent Slate article about plunging attention-spans makes a profound point - that we need to learn how to concentrate:
The key point for teachers and principals and parents to realize is that maintaining attention is a skill. It has to be trained, and it has to be practiced. If we cater to short attention spans by offering materials that can be managed with short attention spans, the skill will not develop. The “attention muscle” will not be exercised and strengthened. It is as if you complain to a personal trainer about your weak biceps and the trainer tells you not to lift heavy things. Just as we don’t expect people to develop their biceps by lifting two-pound weights, we can’t expect them to develop their attention by reading 140-character tweets, 200-word blog posts, or 300-word newspaper articles.
In other words, the “short-attention” phenomenon is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. First, we tell ourselves that people can’t maintain attention. Second, we do nothing to nurture their ability to maintain attention. And sure enough, we “discover” that people can’t maintain attention.
A person who is my age can read a very brief and oversimplified discussion of a complex issue and note that it is brief and oversimplified. Such a person might even try to go deeper by consulting other sources.
But what of a person who has been raised from the crib on such material? For this person, there is no “brief and oversimplified.” There is no experience of “long and complex” to provide a contrast. Before long, people stop realizing that they have an intellectual deficiency that needs correction. Oversimplified becomes the only game in town, at which point, it stops being “over” simplified.
If people are fed a steady diet of the oversimple, it can’t help but affect the way they think about things. Before we know it, the complexity and subtlety of the world we inhabit will be invisible to us when we try to make sense of what is going on around us...
It's obvious that that tendency towards mass stupisation is massive and accelerating. We all find ourselves watching TV and Tweeting and generally fiddling with these gadgets non-stop. Those of us who already have obsessive-compulsive tendencies are hardest hit. We crave the next email or Tweet or gadget-game as much as we might crave sugar or alcohol.
But ... hot damn, this new phone is a magnificent civilisational achievement. The engineering and sheer cleverness are stunning. Fingerprint-recognition technology is a game-changer for all sorts of things down the line.
In Atlas Shrugged a professor of literature sees Francisco on top of a pile in a junk yard, happily dismantling the carcass of an automobile.
"A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world."
Francisco replies, "What do you think I'm doing?"
