2008 Woodie Awards
A Loving Point of View
Laziness: Invention's evil stepmother
Blair Loving
Issue date: 10/26/07 Section: Post
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"Necessity is the mother of invention" - Plato. This philosopher's axiom has either expired or the definition of "necessity" has become decidedly lax. Is it imperative that we stay 15 feet away from the TV while we turn the channel? Must we be able to be in constant contact with friends, family, coworkers, pizza delivery providers and movie information systems? What about that new critically acclaimed and glitch-ridden game system the Playstation 3? Was this actually a necessity for someone? Did someone sit down one day and say to themselves, Wow, we don't have nearly enough game systems for the adolescents and young adults of the world to waste their time on! We NEED to create a new one, make it cost more than $450 dollars and make sure it is almost out of date before it hits the shelves!
Laziness and decadence have adopted the child, invention, and put her to work in the sweatshop of public indulgence. Is it necessity that drives us to have a TV whose picture is so highly advanced you can count the freckles on the news anchor person's face?
I saw an interesting picture online the other day of a plastic spoon. The caption read (in substance), "When did we become a society where harvesting oil, refining it, creating plastic out of it, molding it into the proper shape, packaging it, and trucking it to stores around the world, became more convenient than washing a metal spoon in the sink?" My guess is sometime between the inventions of the first electric toothbrush and the latest, which plays music while you brush.
Television, too, has become a taskmaster. I would love to have someone do a survey on working adults with TIVO in their homes. The cycle of working to earn money, so they can pay for their TIVO, which they use to watch their favorite shows, that they can't watch because they're working during those hours to pay for the TIVO which they use to tape their shows…. And on, and on and on.
The typewriter has become extinct due to the difficulty in changing paper and correcting mistakes. In my house growing we replaced the typewriter with our first word processor. It had a digital display, about the size of an old calculator's. You would type in your sentence, change what needed to be changed, hit the enter button and in one quick pass the type-ball would smack into the paper perfectly. But, changing the paper was still a difficulty, as was the scrolling from left to right to read the little display; so we upgraded to an IBM, the "big blue." I remember being in elementary school when our library got their first computers a long row of large, cream-colored boxes against the wall. "You have died of dysentery" would be the words that ended my lunch hour on most days. (I still love seeing those shirts around reminding me of my lunchtimes of uneaten food in my quest to reach the end of that Oregon Trail game.) Even these fancy computers were seen as too slow and feature-limited soon. Now we have five Megabyte download speeds, terabytes of hard drive space, video processors that can render 3D environments that at times look more like real life than real life does. Soon Wal-Mart will stop selling books and start selling subscription minutes for online libraries and virtual media viewers. Gone are the days of walking to the local library, getting the back of your favorite book stamped for the twentieth time and walking home to read under the tree in your front yard. The convenience of technology has stomped that eye-blurring, tan-burning, heart strengthening activity out of its horrible little existence. Now we can relax, secure in the knowledge that somewhere in Japan there is a toilet that has a computer strapped to it. Thank goodness! How was I ever going to be able to check my email?
Laziness and decadence have adopted the child, invention, and put her to work in the sweatshop of public indulgence. Is it necessity that drives us to have a TV whose picture is so highly advanced you can count the freckles on the news anchor person's face?
I saw an interesting picture online the other day of a plastic spoon. The caption read (in substance), "When did we become a society where harvesting oil, refining it, creating plastic out of it, molding it into the proper shape, packaging it, and trucking it to stores around the world, became more convenient than washing a metal spoon in the sink?" My guess is sometime between the inventions of the first electric toothbrush and the latest, which plays music while you brush.
Television, too, has become a taskmaster. I would love to have someone do a survey on working adults with TIVO in their homes. The cycle of working to earn money, so they can pay for their TIVO, which they use to watch their favorite shows, that they can't watch because they're working during those hours to pay for the TIVO which they use to tape their shows…. And on, and on and on.
The typewriter has become extinct due to the difficulty in changing paper and correcting mistakes. In my house growing we replaced the typewriter with our first word processor. It had a digital display, about the size of an old calculator's. You would type in your sentence, change what needed to be changed, hit the enter button and in one quick pass the type-ball would smack into the paper perfectly. But, changing the paper was still a difficulty, as was the scrolling from left to right to read the little display; so we upgraded to an IBM, the "big blue." I remember being in elementary school when our library got their first computers a long row of large, cream-colored boxes against the wall. "You have died of dysentery" would be the words that ended my lunch hour on most days. (I still love seeing those shirts around reminding me of my lunchtimes of uneaten food in my quest to reach the end of that Oregon Trail game.) Even these fancy computers were seen as too slow and feature-limited soon. Now we have five Megabyte download speeds, terabytes of hard drive space, video processors that can render 3D environments that at times look more like real life than real life does. Soon Wal-Mart will stop selling books and start selling subscription minutes for online libraries and virtual media viewers. Gone are the days of walking to the local library, getting the back of your favorite book stamped for the twentieth time and walking home to read under the tree in your front yard. The convenience of technology has stomped that eye-blurring, tan-burning, heart strengthening activity out of its horrible little existence. Now we can relax, secure in the knowledge that somewhere in Japan there is a toilet that has a computer strapped to it. Thank goodness! How was I ever going to be able to check my email?
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