Poll: Modern Technology and my lack of Excitement over it.

[Madman123456]

Copyright Protection and social media integration. Quite annoying Trends to be sure and in my Opinion, Executives like Adam Orth have their Heads up quite far into the clouds.

"Everything is always online!" But i don't want or need it to be. I'm quite content with not being online occasionally.

I'm not very excited about the new generation of consoles. I do not want to have my non existent social media accounts bound together so i can instagram stuff and it'll show up on my Twitter. And no, i don't have a Facebook account because i read the Terms and Service Agreement and it wasn't for me.

Modern Phones aren't very "modern" in some respects. Flimsy Devices that wont work very efficiently and drain their tiny Battery in a heartbeat, partly because the apps needs to synchronize and auto update.

I feel that for all the "necessity" modern devices have there is very little Choice to be had on the end user market. I would pay real money for a Smartphone that will hold its Charge longer and i wouldn't mind if it had a big fat bulge where the battery is. Make the Phone twice as thick for all i care.
Also, i shouldn't be protecting my Phone from scratches and other damage. For Devices that one should be able to have on Person whereever (s)he goes Smartphones are laughably flimsy.
For Devices costing up to 700$ these things have very little choice on the market. It will be outdated and old in two years anyways so i might as well not bother at all. If i get a new phone next time my contract says it's time, i'll have a "modern" phone for two months or so and then it's outdated again and i'm back to having an outdated phone.

The first contracts with a samsung Galaxy s 4 are already here, i guess it'll be another 5 months until it's "outdated". Might as well keep my old motorola defy, at least it wont shatter into a million pieces when a fly lands on it.


I was always fairly good at filtering the Bullshit from Marketing and getting to the few bits that are actually useful. However, i feel this is getting harder and harder to get to the few bits that i may want because it's more and more bullshit and i feel that i wont miss anything important if i just skip an entire generation of Bullshit.


Does this have something to do with modern Executives having their Heads farther up their asses then usual or am i getting old?

When i say i might just skip the newest generation of Phones for example because it's not worth wading through all the Bullshit in order to get to the good bits, most of which will turn out to be disappointments anyways, is this something my Grandparents said 50 Years ago when this "Stereo" thing came around?

 

[Zhukov]

Not really getting the main thrust of your argument here. Online social networks are popular, modern phones have short battery life (really?) and new models are released frequently.

The horror.

Also, you seem to have a very unstable relationship with your 'shift' key.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

I for one don't see any point in constantly keeping up with the latest in mobile phone tech these days. I use my phone for calls, texts and music and everything else in it is just plain useless and unnecessary

 

[DoPo]

Not really getting the main thrust of your argument here. Online social networks are popular, modern phones have short battery life (really?) and new models are released frequently.

I'm with you here. Seems that modern technology is constrained to social media, DRM and...mobile phones, even though the "outdating" thing was the same even before smart phones.


I dunno, maybe I'm broken or something, but I'm content with the technology that doesn't fall within those things. Which, frankly, is most of it. Let's see, last month I saw the Positional Based Fluids water simulation by nVidia and that brought a smile on my face


But I did feel like something is missing...now if we put, like, social media on it and some DRM it would just be awesome. And then we need to make it run on a phone and drain its batery for the making of the same video and then it will be perfect.

 

[Madman123456]

I feel there's less Stuff to be excited about because i figure out that most of it is Crap.

Is skipping more and more of the newest shiny technology a result of this technology being mostly Crap or is this me getting older?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Modern technology is getting dumber?

You have a little computer with a touch screen that fits in your pocket and which has more ram and processing power than the average PC did 5 years ago, but no, you're right, modern technology is stupid.

/sarcasm.

Social media. Boo hoo. I don't have facebook or twitter, or any of this other crap either, but I accept that it's a very popular thing and I accept it. Hell, I even see some of the good in it. Just because I don't care for it doesn't mean that modern technology catering to a popular social trend automatically makes all said technology stupid and pointless.

Smart phones having poor battery life. Boo Hoo. Ever thought of turning the internet off in your phone? It's amazing how much your battery life shoots up when you only have the wifi and 3G turned on when you're actually using it. Seriously, the charge in my phone lasts at least a couple of days, sometimes up to a week if I don't feel like being bothered by messages.

Technology gets outdated. Boo hoo. Guess you better stop typing on your computer and throw it out the window, since that gets outdated just as fast. Just because something is "outdated" doesn't mean it doesn't work or that you can't use it. Rather than being upset about your shiny new phone not being shiny and new within 2 months you should be asking yourself why exactly you feel that you always need the newest and shiniest things. Maybe it doesn't bother you that technology gets outdated, but you just always feel entitled to have the best new stuff and feel frustrated when you don't. That's not the fault of the market, that's just your own ego, and the fact that you've fallen for stupid marketing.

 

[FalloutJack]

Snip

Both of your poll options are wrong. People are just stupid. Age has nothing to do with it and technology - or at least the fun parts of it - is still awesome.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Modern technology is always going to seem unimpressive. It may have been impressive 10 years ago, but about the time it gets here we are taking it for granted.

When I was young, we didn't have internet access. Now that I have my own laptop I can download gigabytes of random rubbih on, I don't see it as impressive anymore.

 

[Madman123456]

Snip

Both of your poll options are wrong. People are just stupid. Age has nothing to do with it and technology - or at least the fun parts of it - is still awesome.

Being oblivious to things modern technology has to offer doesn't have to go along with getting old but there is certainly a correlation.
Anyways, i was wondering if my getting rather tired with modern flashy marketing and discovering mostly Crap behind it has to do more with modern marketing becoming ever more colorful or if this is me getting closer to the Place where my Parents are, who cared less and less about all the new things you can buy and eventually ground to a halt somewhere in the 80's.

They have a CRT TV which i bought for them about 20 years ago after their old one broke and are content with watching this increasingly irrelevant medium which has mainly scripted reality in various flavors to offer.


Will i eventually do the same? Stop at some point in time and consume media from that point in time on devices from that point in time until it seems roughly as modern as a Gramophone?

Personally i'd like to think that my Brain is so wonderfully magnificent that it wont fall for expertly crafted media marketing by People looking back on centuries of marketing history and expertise. But maybe i'm wrong and i'm just getting older

 

[FalloutJack]

Heh

Look, I sympathize. I have parents that comprehend the new stuff about as well as goldfish here as well. But I think we of this generation who have dipped our hands into the things going on with the internet, robotics, games, space, and even fricking lasers are not going to have their brains shrivel so easily.

I do not...

carry a cellphone
use Facebook or similar
drive a car
use certain consoles

...pretty much out of a personal preference.

That I do not involve myself directly in their use does not mean they are or will ever be beyond me. It's just that they're not as relevent to me as other things. The thing is, technology is a wide canvas to paint over with an opinion about it. Social media sites are - by my own words - crap, worthless to me. But my Doom-O-Meter doesn't go off because of these things. Just because people are catered to by money-grubbing assholes doesn't mean technology is old OR you're out of touch.

 

[trollnystan]

Also, you seem to have a very unstable relationship with your 'shift' key.

He's German. They do that.

OP: It's probably a combination of both, but mostly it's that we're getting old. I say this as a Facebook and Twitter user BTW, take that as you will.

 

[GodzillaGuy92]

I'd suggest adding an "Other" and/or "Somewhere in between" option to the poll. It's not that technology or the people who produce it are getting stupider, it's that technology has caught up to our preexisting stupidity. Now that we can create electronic devices with always-online connections, integrated social media functions, and power-leeching apps, we're blindly doing so without stopping to question whether we should.

 

[MindFragged]

fair enough if new tech isn't exciting you. I think that cynicism provided by age probably has something to do with it. You're aware that any new tech is not going to be the 'ultimate' whatever because we've all seen enough 'ultimate' things to know this, and that new tech will have shortcomings and teething problems.

Nevertheless, the way I see it, technology literally evolves. You get some weird off-shoot lines of the genetic tree of any sort of device, and over time things that don't work are dropped, and things that do see wider usage. There are relatively few real breakthroughs - the mobile phone, the personal computer, the home console, the laptop, the tablet, home video player, etc. - to the amount of updates of existing devices. But even if the differences between each update might seem minimal, look how far home cinema systems have come in the last, what is it, 30 odd years?

So basically it's fair enough to be disappointed with the shortcomings of any one generation of tech, but we wouldn't be where we are without progress, and progress needs failure and time.

 

[Zantos]

I'm pretty excited for modern technology personally. Later this year I'll have access to no less than three supercomputing clusters to run all manner of simulations working towards my shiny new mantra of "make it better, cheaper". I might even be getting an Nvidia Tesla Personal Supercomputer for my personal workstation, details like that will be sorted out nearer the time.

So yeah, maybe the social media integration and the smart phones of limited battery aren't that exciting to people. But that is only the small portion of banal technology that's immediately in front of your face. You don't need to look particularly far to see the cool stuff going on with lasers and supercomputers and quantum things that are happening every day.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

Actually, from what I've been told by reliable sources, most new smartphones aren't as flimsy as they look, especially the screen, which is completely scratch-proof.

I also choose not to involve myself in social sites like Facebook, but not because they're beyond me, I just don't feel like participating in those things.

 

[The Lugz]

Also, you seem to have a very unstable relationship with your 'shift' key.

I agree, excessive shiftiness should be a capitol offence.

and both the poll options are somewhat ignorant, were moving into the world of 'ubiquitous computing' where computers technology and interactions with anything non human will be dealt with in an organic way that has little or no setup or expertise required, so we can get on with being human and forget about being binary animals

it's both good and bad, it should encourage greater social integration but at the cost of less computing expertise overall and it's also nothing new, the concept is as old as the internet.. it's just taken this long to become viable.

 

[Genocidicles]

I just dislike how everything is converging into the same device.

Before, we had books, music players, radios, gaming devices, phones, cameras, tvs and computers, and now all of that is just put onto a smartphone or tablet, and they're not stopping. Soon they'll have keys and credit cards built into the damn things. So everything you use day to day will be on one device. One device with a pathetically short battery-life, that is incredibly easy to break or lose, and is outdated a month after it's released.

I really don't think the convenience of carrying everything around with you in your pocket is worth losing it all because you forgot to charge it the night before or you drop it and it lands on its screen.

 

[loc978]

The only solid complaint about "technology" I see here is smartphone battery life, which...

modern phones have short battery life (really?)

Yes. They absolutely fucking do. I have a 4 year old "dumb" phone with its original battery... which still lasts a week on idle or several days with heavy use (which is considerably less than it lasted when new). Compare that to maybe 24 hours idle or 8 of heavy use you get from even the best "smart" phones these days.
They really aren't any more flimsy than they've ever been, though.

On topic:
The rest of the complaints have to do with culture surrounding technology and trends in software. Much like we saw with cars in the late 90s, hardware is getting more advanced, but the way it's being used in manufacturing is bafflingly impractical. The philosophy of "form following function" is pretty well dead in modern culture, replaced by "form. There's another part?"

Or maybe I'm getting old too.

Also, Zhukov is right about your shift key, Madman.

 

[tahrey]

I think as you get older, the excitement and shiny-factor of having the latest and greatest new thing to show off to your friends, and the oppressive feeling that you can't possibly live without said items, fades away and is replaced by an awful realisation of just how much they cost... plus a shift to showing off in other ways (but less often, and focussing more on shared experiences). Plus the subconscious background knowledge that, before awesome new gadget X came along you were already quite happily living a decent and full life without it, so what really is it going to offer you on top of that? So long as it offers the features you've gotten used to taking for granted, and does them a little better and cheaper, that'll be fine.

At least, that's sort of how I see the curve of my relationship with technology already progressing. My current computer is almost 7 years old, and the phone almost 2. Both of them were massive steps up from what I had before, because those things were generally horrible and broken as I wasn't long done with being a kid and was rather poor.

Now I'll be perfectly happy to replace them, as they age and start to work more slowly and less reliably, and lose the ability to cope with more modern code, with upgrades that are very nearly like-for-like, except being up to date and thus more usable... for about the same tasks. Faster processor, more disk (and maybe more memory, but that's not a pressure at the moment) and some software bugfixes and we'll be laughing. There's probably some all new whizbang alternative now, but this all works, I can do the actual business of my life without wanting for more or figuring the time lost adapting to a new system as worth it.

10 years ago, my mind just didn't work this way ... but it does now.

 

[Sansha]

-snip-

In regards to cellphones, batteries are heavy - making them fatter is not - to me - a feasible option because the phone will weigh too much to be carried in one's pocket. I still have my father's first cellphone from the early 90's - it weighs less than 100 grams, and the battery pack weighs two kilograms.
The only time my phone has run out of battery power and shut down is the day I spent in New York City. I took a little over a thousand photos, constantly checking my map to see where I was, and talking to a friend via Facebook chat about what I was seeing for a twelve-hour stretch was the only thing that defeated my phone's battery - and I started the day at 70%.

Thing is, battery technology has apparently reached its zenith - they cannot make a battery hold more energy at this stage.

And as far as 'outdated' goes, I bought my first cellphone when I was seventeen - a Sanyo 7400. At the time, it was the latest and greatest thing out there, and I replaced it in 2012 - for the sole reason that the cellphone network it ran on was shutting down and being replaced with a more up-to-date system. I replaced it with a Galaxy S3 - the latest and greatest at the time, and I plan to keep this phone until it is incapable of functioning. I don't need to be constantly updated - the Sanyo did everything I needed it to until I was forced to retire it, and the S3 does the same as well as having stuff that I like - namely internet access making me incapable of boredom, Google Maps allowing me to find wherever I need to go, and I can even use the camera flash as a flashlight, which I find myself using nearly daily.

You don't *need* to get sucked in to marketing and the need to have new technology. Buy what you want and be happy with that. I can afford to replace my phone every time a new model comes out, but frankly I don't want to, so I won't. I have Facebook for the sole purpose of keeping in touch with distant friends; Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest etc don't interest me at all.

Just... ignore it, dude.