Tag Archive for 'wow people are dumb'

Wow, Businessweek has really gone downhill since they were bought by Bloomberg. Actually, it probably started going to crap when they fired most of the talented people back in 2001 (when they were known by the much less awkward-looking moniker BusinessWeek), but I digress.

Take this article by Joel Stein (mirrored by MSNBC) which asserts that not owning a cellphone is a “power move”, because it “means that the world has to run on your time.” If you don’t have a cellphone, then nobody can call you whenever they want, an occurrence which under all circumstances will cause you to drop everything that you’re doing, right?

Getting off the mobile grid forces others to wait for you to get in touch with them. Afsheen John Radsan, 47, a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., was assistant general counsel at the CIA and an attorney at the Justice Dept. All sans cell. He even refused to get an answering machine until his parents installed one at his apartment behind his back. Radsan began his habit of not answering phones when he was a young lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell. “If you were called on a Friday, it could only be a partner asking you to work over the weekend,” he remembers. “And we had caller ID. So some of the partners would call from an outside phone and say, ‘We got you!’”

Well, actually, no. This paragraph has demonstrated that it is not, in fact, a violation of general relativity for a human being to ignore a ringing phone. The rest of the article goes on to quote other people who’ve “taken control over their lives” talking about the evils of phone calls, phone calls, phone calls everywhere they go, completely ignoring the fact that cellphones can be set up to do an extraordinary gamut of things, ranging from never ringing or vibrating to sending all incoming calls directly to voicemail, while still retaining the ability to originate outgoing calls. Which, by the way, is a nice thing:

Hanya Yanagihara, 35, traveled the world as a deputy editor for Condé Nast Traveler without any portable communication device. “In India, even the yak herders and rickshaw drivers have cell phones,” she says. Occasionally, when her plans get canceled, she wishes she had one. A few weeks ago her plane schedule got scrambled and she had to tell an associate, so she borrowed a phone from a stranger on her flight. “They give you a sort of pitying look, and assume you’re lying or hitting on them,” she says of cell-phone lenders. “Then they ask for the number and carefully punch it in. They think you’re calling international. They’re very suspicious.”

Elena Kostoglodova, a senior instructor in Russian at the University of Colorado at Boulder…[says that] The only time that she was sorry not to have a mobile phone was when a teenager rammed into her car. She had to ask the kid to call the cops.

The holes in Mr. Stein’s logic aren’t only exemplified by the patent lack of self-control these “control takers” exhibit in not trusting themselves to ignore the damn phone call (save for the aforementioned guy who actually, um, does), nor to the blatant Luddism displayed by these “power brokers” in being unfamiliar with the concept of a “power button”. It’s also illustrated by the fact that only Luddites equate cellphones with making phone calls anymore.

Yes, phone calls are inconvenient, obtrusive, clumsy, and extremely undesirable under almost all circumstances. That’s why text messages were invented.

Nobody uses their cellphone to make phone calls anymore. Especially iPhone owners, because they can’t.

Admittedly, that’s hyperbolic (except for the iPhone part), but any regular cellphone user with half a brain very rarely makes or takes calls. There’s no point. Text messages work fine for 99% of conversations, and they are decidedly not obtrusive or interrupting. Sure, the phone beeps or vibrates at you when you get a new text message, but that doesn’t mean you have to look at or answer it immediately. In fact, the entire point of a text message is asynchronous, non-interrupting communication. This is what contemporary cellphones are built for; the term cellphone is a vestigial misnomer.

So, no, people who don’t own cellphones are not more in control of themselves, and are most definitely Luddites, in almost every case, especially the ones cited by this poorly-thought out article written by a Luddite.

But it was syndicated by MSNBC, so what did I expect?