Modern Technology: One Write Gadget, Others ‘Wrong’
It is not unnatural for persons of my generation to be unconversant with the boons of modern technology. I use a computer; we have a videotape recorder; we cook with microwave. I am aware that we are also the passive beneficiaries of numerous technological advances in medicine, accounting and entertainment.
However, we are constantly bumping into some new term which, despite the frequency of its occurrence, we don’t quite know the meaning of.
My wife called our youngest grandson the other day to ask what he wanted for his eighth birthday. He said he wanted a Nintendo. She told me she heard his father shout “No!” (He later explained to her that Nintendo was monstrously addictive, and that his children were exposed to it often enough in their friends’ homes, without having one of their own.)
By inference, we gathered that a Nintendo is some kind of insidious video game--one so voracious of children’s time that it threatens to increase illiteracy by 50%.
So Nintendo will never intrude in our lives, no matter how trendy it becomes; but I am less certain about several other new products that are advertised in a catalogue that comes to me by junk mail from DAK Industries.
High on the list of gadgets I don’t need is something called Double Play, which makes it possible to see two television shows at once. A second program of one’s choice is shown in a small square in the upper right-hand corner of one’s screen.
“Imagine cheering a running back as he dives for a touchdown at the same time a home run heads for the stands,” the ad enthuses; “then duck from the laser blasts of rival spaceships, while you simultane-ously watch a killer pull a knife on his victims.”
I can’t imagine anything more distracting or confusing than watching two television images at one time. When I’m watching a home run ball fly over a fence I don’t want to watch a running back dive for a touchdown. A good television show should be all-engrossing.
What would be more likely, in any case, is that while you were watching a beer commercial on the big screen you would see a Ford commercial in the little square.
Another ad hypes a telephone answering machine that was developed by PhoneMate but was taken off the shelves because it was too complicated for salespeople to explain. DAK picked it up cheap.
Like those salespeople, I can’t possibly explain in a few hundred words what this machine does. Briefly, it’s an AM/FM digital tuning radio (with seven presets); a memory-dialing telephone (with nine numbers); a two-alarm clock radio, and an answering machine with remote monitoring.
I recently knocked my answering machine off the desk and it hasn’t worked since. However, I don’t need an answering machine that plays AM and FM and wakes me up, since I keep it in my work room, where I do not like distracting sounds and am theoretically awake.
Another gadget that I’m not ready for is X-10 Home Automation, a little hand-held box by which one can turn every light in the house on or off; you can start the air-conditioning unit or the toaster or coffee maker or the computer. No need to get out of bed to get things going.
Another gadget that seems to offer more than I need is the AM/FM Plus TV Micro-Radio. The breakthrough feature about this one is that you can tune in on your TV sound , so that you can listen to TV while you’re jogging or working in the yard or whatever.
It seems to me that nothing saves us from continuous TV but the need to be elsewhere--driving, working out, walking, dining, playing golf. If we could take the sound with us, and tune in wherever we were, there would be no escape, and soon all of us would be as illiterate as mice.
I foresee a kind of human being who would develop the ability to watch one TV show on the big screen while watching another on the little square and listening to a third on the AM/FM Plus TV Micro-Radio. The mind reels.
It’s possible I could be helped by a Word Finder that puts an electronic 220,000-word thesaurus and a 100,000-word speller and dictionary at one’s fingertips.
“Varoom!” the ad reads. “Fasten your seat belts. And, hold on tight! Now you can race (zoom, speed, dash) to a richer and more vivid vocabulary. Now you can forget the travail (def. arduous labor, pain) of using a dictionary. . . . The right synonym (def. word with the same meaning as another) can turn a dull, lifeless sentence into one alive with vitality. . . .”
Oh, well, any writer who uses the verb enthuse (def. effervesce, bubble over, emote, gush) could probably profit from an electronic Word Finder.
