Brave New iPhone

Okay, I don't know what it is... maybe I'm old fashioned, but have you checked out the new iPhone lately? I was laying in bed one night with my TV on, and a commercial came on that was featuring the iPhone's newest application called "Shazam". Apparently you can hold up your phone to a song, and the iPhone can tell you which song it is, on which album, complete with album picture, etc.

I nearly had a panick attack. I know it's a little strange - being in buisness and a recent graduate you'd think I'd be all for the newest technologies that completely blow your mind. Not in this case. It really got my wheels turning...

It just oh so Big Brother, isn't it? You can't even walk around somewhere without your little handy dandy device knowing what sounds are going on around you. It makes you wonder when we'll be able to capture things on camera and have our little iPhone's tell us exactly what we're looking at. All hearing, all seeing, all knowing.

It's just getting a little overhwhelming. I mean, sure a GPS is great to have when you have no idea where you're going. But do we ever consider the capabilities that these devices are creating for companies and governments that would pay big bucks to know exactly where we are going, what we are doing, what we are seeing, listening to, and paying for? It's happening right now, and we naievely believe it's empowering - we feel that in our little world, we have the world at our fingertips, our employees on a leash ("if they have a Blackberry, they have NO excuse!") but really, it's the companies who produce these technologies that are really benefiting. We carry around these sensors all day, everyday - blindly accepting that we are their research subjects for whichever product or idea they come up with next.

The disheartnening thing about this reality, is the obsolescence of it all, and the irrelevence of your capabilities if you are without the latest and greatest equipment. If I show up in a boardmeeting without an iPhone and Blackberry, and everyone else has one, it automatically makes me less relevant as a business person - clearly behind in the times, and most likely my thinking and ideas as well. So, the pressure that obsolescence creates to achieve social status is enough to make even the strongest protestors adjust to our inevitable fate.

I'm just saying. There's a line, and it's up to us to know where it is.

Keep Bizzy!!

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"Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too-all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides-made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions... Suggestions from the State."

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Ch. 2