How Kindle is killing snobbery
"There's a wonderful chapter on the rise and fall of the video phone, which creates an incredible social pressure for people to appear attractive onscreen, which sets off a kind of arms race -- purchasing masks and bodysuits to wear on the phone, and so forth." --
I've never understood social complexities of status. The fact that I am a snob of some sort does not mean I must be conspicuous about my semi-strange or out-dated consumer tastes. It mostly means I'll have nothing to say to people who talk only about things I find beneath my interest. Based on my understanding of a social network or a social context of status, it seems more important to have broad interest and thus be capable of interacting with a wide selection of people than to be an apparent expert in one or two things.
Since I'm anti-social generally, I don't care to interact with a wide selection of people and by extension don't place much importance on my status in the broader competitive nature of things. I tend more to care about specific status interactions rather than some general or popular conception of my "status". Things that are influenced by competency or expertise, even of a broad nature (since I'm a quasi-generalist academically speaking, dabbling in whatever interests me that week).
And quite frankly, I'm in agreement that the Internet gives more of a reinforcing nature of snobbery anyway in the format of all the sharing of information it enables. It means instead of conspicuously draping before the commoners that you have the vestiges of an education or class status, you are draping it before your peers in a competitive reinforcement of your intra-group interests.
The Law of Conservation of Judgment
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I don't know...maybe I'm a snob-lover, or just a snob, or maybe it's two pints of Great Lakes Independence Ale, but that whole thing was hot. LOL. Then again, I have a couple hundred Facebook "friends" and I was thinking that it'd be nice to have a Kindle or whatever cheaper knockoff comes soon simply so the next time I'm reading at the beach the pages don't flap in the wind. Annoying.
I suppose I will take that as complimentary.
I have no interest in reading at the beach or spending $300 on something that isn't practical yet. Ipods (and their generic spawn) are practical applications, in that you have greater choice of music and portability over existing technology and there's an architecture involved in the technology itself that makes it even more portable and flexible. There isn't in e-books. You have to get them from Amazon if you have a Kindle. You don't have to get your music or podcasts through Apple if you have an I-pod.
It was meant that way ;-).
Good points. I'd never spend that amount of money, and certainly not anytime soon. Like most - or at least some - new technologies, best to wait for it to become cheaper (like me!) and be made to work better, to be practical, as you said.
So you don't like the oceanside, or just not reading there? ;-)
I've found I generally do plenty of reading elsewhere. When being ocean or lakeside, it seems I ought to have better things to do. Or at least different things. I don't see the point in taking a vacation to do what I always do.
Good point. I let myself read a no-real-thinking-required book when at the beach. Still reading, just not as mind intensive. Different enough for me!
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