luddite, me

[anotheranon]

Even though I'm an IT professional, there are certain modern conveniences and toys/gadgets where I'm somewhat lost on the appeal:

1) Cellular phones. I do have one.... to make phone calls on when I'm traveling/not near my desk or land line/in an emergency. I feel no great need to play games on it, or browse the web on a 1"X1" screen, or bug everyone in the grocery store checkout with my private conversations :P I find it somewhere between funny and sad that the manual that came with it is ~100 pages and bigger than the phone itself.

Though, I admit, the camera and address book features are nice.

2) Video games: to be fair, I was never all that good at the old arcade/Nintendo variety, and while the graphics on the new-new-new kind are fantastic, the appeal is lost on me. Even after being told that there are games that feature swordplay, the fact that you manipulate the sword with buttons and don't actually get to hit anything.. well, this seems to me like it would suck all the aerobic and getting-to-hit-people fun out of the process.

3) Online music consumption. Admittedly this could change as my teenage vinyl fiend isn't dead, but it is pining for the thrill of the record store chase - finding the disc (vinyl or CD) in perfect condition with all the liner notes...[ahem]. Seriously - the free/cheap and easy availability of music outside the record company monopoly is exciting to me from a "new music SQUEE!" standpoint, I just can't quite let go of the trappings of my youth.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what I'm missing, or should I be content to be a stuffy old fart?

What about you - any new conveniences or entertainments that you really don't feel the need to pursue?

Comments

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

I kind of liked when I had a phone I could use to check my e-mail when I wasn't home. But other than that, I had a hell of a time finding a phone that was fairly crap-feature-light. "Umm...no, really. I want to use it to make phone calls. No really, that's about all.."

I also have a Palm Pilot which I heart deeply, as it means I no longer have to remember anything on my own. But I have had every freeware game in the universe on there, for a week each, before I got bored and/or never played the thing. you can get free books which is nice, but I actually LIKE pages.

I don't have the hand-eye coordination for most video games, except for the odd Myst-like adventure type. As for music - hell - I have CD's I've not gotten around to listening to!

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I had a hell of a time finding a phone that was fairly crap-feature-light.

I had D. do the research when we were looking for new phones, but reminded him that I DIDN'T need all the bells and whistles (though I know he wanted some for himself). I think he chose well, he just uses more of the features than I do.

My big requirement was buttons large enough for me to find efficiently. I have nightmares about being unable to dial a phone correctly so this was really important to me!

[geekchick]

The thing I like most about online music availability is that it's generally easy to check out a single track to see if it's worthwhile buying the entire album. I've found tons of stuff available for free download that let me decide whether I'm interested in hearing more, and other stuff that I'm willing to pay 99 cents to explore but I wouldn't consider if I was stuck buying an overpriced CD single. Plus, I can have a several hundred albums stored on a hard drive rather than taking up huge amounts of space that we don't have anymore. And you've seen our CD shelves, so you know it's not that I'm adverse to buying actual CDs as well. =) I do have several CDs that I bought entirely because of the cover art, and that experience does get kind of lost if you're exclusively buying online.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I'm ALL for downloadable music as a preview tool - in retrospect, an asking price of $16-20 for a full-length CD (or hell, $5 for the single) is a criminal amount of $ to spend only to be disappointed and have it fill up shelf space. Even with the amount of "research" (reading lots of record reviews) I used to do, I still managed to wind up with some dud CDs that I could never unload!

This is one anachronism I wish I could get past - keeping your entire collection on your computer makes much more economic/space saving sense (and taste sense, if you're looking for something unusual) than the old school trucking out to the store to paw through the stacks...

[rubyjones.livejournal.com]

i just hate mobile phones, i have no idea how mine works plus i just hate people being able to ring me all the time. i keep mine in my car in case i break down and need to call the RAC and sometimes in my handbag just because, but otherwise i keep it turned off and let it silently mock me with all it's fancy buttons.

i like playstation, though not enough to buy one for myself. my baby sisters have the games and equip our parents' home and i play there. though i'm not very skilled and i spend ages on the lower levels. i like how shiny everything is.

[jlsjlsjls.livejournal.com]

We'll have to form a luddite club. With the newsletter produced on a manual typewriter (hey, that's what I learned to type on ... gives you nice strong fingers for lifting two-ton encyclopedias and nursing textbooks ***grin***).

Cellphone: have had possession of cellphone since June 2003. It does live in my purse, but has spent most of its life switched off, aside from my first week in Calgary when I couldn't get the regular phone hooked up right away ... I think I've loaned it to other people who need to call their ride more often than I've used it myself (probably less than twenty calls total on my part ... mainly to make hairdresser appointments from a quiet corner at work when it was too noisy to use the office phone). Oh, and the little critter has no bells and whistles ... not even a voicemail account. It stores numbers that called and can give out an "answering machine" message to callers if it's switched on and that's about it.

Video games: the common speed/shoot/explosion/race types don't interest me at all. I try out puzzle/logic games online once in a while, but have discovered that I can't do the ones requiring speed ... the aspect of my astigmatism that makes it hard to me to sharply focus on horizontal lines also makes it difficult for me to keep fast-moving images on a computer screen in focus (I have a similar problem with extremely fast-moving images on theatre screens, especially since the majority move across the screen ... "Serenity" earns extra cool points from me because much of the fast motion is vertical/diagonal, so I could actually track it in the theatre)

Online/downloadable music: Definitely prefer to own the packaged recording rather than have it on the computer; there's very little music stored on my hard-drive and it comes off the second I get my hands on the CD. I only listen to stuff on the computer if I'm actually working on the computer, and I figure I might as well listen to BBC7 or Bat Segundo or something else that I can ONLY access through the Internet. Besides, I've seen enough computers crash permanently (not my own ... yet, anyway) to feel that I'd rather have any sounds I value in a more permanent form. Plus I like liner notes and booklets and pictures and stuff, I like scanning the spines of my collection and picking something out to play ... a computer file list just isn't the same. 'sides, some of my stuff has been purchased direct from the performer at concerts (even a restaurant with a live show) ... a downloaded file lacks that pleasant and personal memory.

I also prefer my movies and other viewing in DVD (or VHS) form ... my comfort distance for watching visuals is very different from my comfort distance for reading text on a screen ... I prefer pictures to be MUCH further away (besides, the TV screen is bigger than the computer screen, the sound quality is better, and the couch is comfier than the chair at the desk).

[semmie17.livejournal.com]

Television.

Don't watch it, except in the summers with Gigi, and even then just because it's been turned on by Mikey.

I'm happy to download and/or purchase movies and TV shows on DVD to watch, though. I just hate commercials almost to the point of neurosis. I'm really looking into the next generation of cable, that will allow you to purchase-by-show what you want to watch -- it's the ultra-demographic type of consumerism -- sort of like Netflicks but for television, and downloadable.

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

I do know what you mean - it's not TV, the medium I dislike so much as keeping up with things as their aired. It is seldom that I'll make much effort to watch a show when it's on week to week when I know that it will be out on DVD in a couple of months anyway, and I won't have to wait a week to see what happens :P

An exception might be the new Battlestar Galactica - if I can remember when it's on I might try and catch it when it airs.