Tech 3

Hi everyone. Hope you had a restful break and are ready to get back to class! 1MA/4 your articles are at this hyperlink. Here's the article for this week's class for 1MA/3:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/technology/personaltech/09PHONES.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

How I Learned to Stop Worrying by Loving the Smartphone

Angelica Rogers

By DAMON DARLIN

Published: June 8, 2011

WHEN I think back to what I was like before the advent of the smartphone, I realize I must have been a quivering ball of anxiety.
I’d come out of a subway and walk for blocks in the wrong direction, searching as my appointment neared for a public map only to find the “You Are Here” X blotted out by the thousands of lost souls before me who pressed their fingers to the same spot in hopes of somehow getting reoriented.
I’d stand drumming my fingers in a long checkout line full of people who believed that the best time to pull out a checkbook was after the last item had been scanned and the bill totaled.
I’d begin worrying about memory loss when I could no longer remember important facts like what Longfellow tavern Henry Ford had bought and restored.
Now I’m sunny and carefree, and it’s not because of some pharmacological miracle. It’s all because of a bundle of plastic, glass, microchips and loads of software: my smartphone.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the device is changing our lives. Historians will remember the advent of the smartphone as something as important as the elevator,  air-conditioner and automobile. Those inventions reshaped our external lives with tall buildings in sprawling cities in previously inhospitable places. The smartphone has changed our internal lives.
Some people see those inventions as ruining our world. And judging by the hand wringing of any number of social critics, like Jaron Lanier or Nicholas Carr, who had the attention span to write whole books on the subject, the smartphone is changing their world for the worse.
One of the more accessible takes on what these critics think will happen is in “Super Sad True Love Story,” the dystopian novel by Gary Shteyngart. The hero, like nearly everyone else, wears a smartphonelike device, an äppärät, around his neck that gives him all the information he needs and tracks his bank accounts as well as his popularity. Despite the device, the hero is a quivering ball of anxiety.
But for most people — and as the technology gets cheaper, billions more people will have access to the machines — a smartphone will change their lives and most likely for the better. The little improvements in life will matter. How? Don’t get me started.  
1. I am never lost.  
It is more than the Google Maps on a smartphone that keep me from going in the wrong direction. Transit maps like Pocket MUNI for when I am in San Francisco or NYC Mate and iTrans NYC for when I am in New York help prevent me from getting lost underground. NextBus, a wonderful Web site that monitors the arrival of city buses in many big cities, is a godsend.
As is SitOrSquat, an app for finding public restrooms.
And it is not just the maps. The translation software on a smartphone like Google Translate with its ability to “hear” foreign languages  is good enough that I could ask a stranger in a strange land how to find a bathroom without resorting to the desperate use of pantomime.
I can also navigate nearly any menu — although I am still waiting for an app that can read handwritten Chinese characters on a menu. (If an app like Leafsnap can distinguish a mulberry leaf from a sycamore leaf, why can’t a phone translate the specials written on the walls?)
The anxiety that I felt traveling has nearly disappeared. Best of all, I never look like a tourist anymore because instead of a map signaling “Mug me” or “Fleece me,” I am just one more person staring into the phone.
(The corollary to this is that I am never late. Actually, I suspect that I am late a lot more than I ever was. But now the guilt is gone. I figure I keep no one waiting by calling ahead.)
2. I never pay too much.
Speaking of getting fleeced, the phone relieves the anxiety of thinking — no, knowing — that somewhere you could have bought it for less. There are apps like SnapTell, which gives you the price of books online when you snap a picture of the cover, and Hipmunk for airfares. Going to price comparison sites is nothing new, but having them available in the store is.
3. I am never bored or wasting time.
The slow checkout line? The delayed flight? These are no longer sources of distress. They are opportunities to relax by playing games, listening to the soundtrack of your life that is always with you or reading.
It gives me a chance to catch up on all the online articles that I saved using Instapaper, which automatically downloads them to my phone in readable format. I’ve started buying books and magazine subscriptions because it is so handy to carry my bookshelf with me on the phone.
There is a downside to all this information all the time. It aggravates another disorder — a short attention span. It’s not wasting time to flit from one thing to another, often stopping at Google or in-phone reference guides. That’s just the price I pay for the next benefit.
4. I am never without an answer.
Not to sound like a know-it-all, but it is now easy to be a know-it-all. How many times in a conversation have you been stumped by a question? You used to drop the topic and move on. Now when you hit a wall, you have the answer no matter where you are. The conversation, refreshed, moves to the next point.
5. I never forget anything.
Well, hardly anything. O.K., not as much as I used to. Of course, Google begins to substitute for my memory of that useless trivia. That may be changing our inner lives by making us all a little bit dumber. But if the smartphone can help us recall events in our own lives, it has yet another purpose that makes us, if not smarter, at least wiser. The smartphone gives me the ability to record my life and becomes an auxiliary memory of everything I do. Granted, most of it is trivial. I use Evernote to record the wine I drink or the names of restaurants — because I have no memory for that sort of thing. It captures and organizes all my business cards. But it also holds snatches of conversation, ideas for articles and things I research.
So I’d like to think that it frees my mind for more important things and helps me make connections. Now what was my next point?