It’s not stealing, it’s an iPod intervention
IT WAS ME. I did it. All those iPods, all those camera phones that the LAPD says are being snatched out of thousands of young hands across Los Angeles this year -- all my doing. So cuff me and haul me off. No jury will convict me, at least no jury of my peers. At the worst I’ll skate with a mistrial because Juror No. 8 was resetting his iPod shuffle instead of listening to the testimony.
I didn’t do it for my sake, weary though I am of the sounds and sights of texting and plinking, of music leaking and BlackBerrys a-winking.
I did it for your sake -- you, the always wired. And you’ll be thanking me for this one day.
The Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg just polled 12- to 24-year-olds and, oh, guess what? They’re bored. TV, cable, movies, computer, iPod, Xboxes -- and they’re bored. Even more bored than when teenagers had just three TV channels, AM radio and record players. With an ennui threshold as low as Badwater in Death Valley, how could more than 1,500 of them stayed on the phone long enough to answer pollsters’ questions? Listen to Ohio 13-year-old, Shannon Carlson: “I feel bored like all the time, ‘cause there is like nothing to do.”
In spite of their utter, utter boredom, kids like Shannon say they multi-task because they’re too busy to do just one thing at a time. Or, conversely, it’s just too boring to do one thing at a time.
Ain’t that the truth? Keep it in mind when your dentist starts text-messaging during your root canal. Or the neurosurgeon is repairing your damaged ganglia at the same time she’s downloading new songs on her iPod.
Nathaniel Johnson, a multi-tasker and senior at Claremont High, marveled to the pollsters: “You can open five or six [computer] programs simultaneously: work on a project, type a report, watch YouTube, check e-mail and watch a movie.” But he acknowledged that “generally you feel overwhelmed at some point if you are trying to do too many things at once.”
I told you I stole your BlackBerry, your MP3 player and your cellphone for your own good. And UCLA backs me up. Its new study of people in their 20s found that multi-taskers don’t absorb “facts and concepts” as well as the more focused. “When distractions force you to pay less attention to what you are doing, you don’t learn as well as if you had paid full attention,” said Russell Poldrack, who’s the coauthor of the study.
If ever there were an anti-multi-tasking poster person, it’s Nicole Arney. She was 17 when she was killed last year near Eureka -- talking on a cellphone, driving a minivan at least 50 in a 20-mph zone and not wearing a seat belt.
So, cellphones and driving don’t mix. But listen up: You have to stop with the ear buds too. DMV section 27400, I quote: “A person operating a motor vehicle or bicycle may not wear a headset covering, or earplugs in, both ears.” Yes, that does mean iPod buds. You have to be able to hear sirens or train whistles, something more urgent than the All-American Rejects’ greatest hits.
Hey, by this time, you’re lucky you can still hear at all. The docs are starting to worry about all that volume you’re stuffing deep into your ears. Your average MP3 can crank up to 120 decibels -- as loud as a jet takeoff, louder than most motorcycles, and at least 30 decibels higher than any sustained safe limits.
Perhaps this was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s real agenda in giving British Prime Minister Tony Blair an iPod souvenir -- black, 60 gigabytes -- of his California visit: If Blair blasts his considerable ears with the 15,000-song capacity, his only response during parliamentary question time may be, “What?”
Kids, I don’t want you to have to worry about that. I want to spare you the kind of thing that happened in Baghdad in May: The speaker of the parliament was giving a TV interview in the lobby when another lawmaker’s cellphone rang with a Shiite prayer chant. The speaker is a Sunni, he sent a bodyguard to turn off the phone and, well, two days’ worth of ugly ensued.
Do you really want to follow that hoary old hippie, Timothy Leary, whose life-map was “Turn on, tune in, drop out”? Is no moment ever good enough unless it has its own private soundtrack? Will I go to your wedding and see you texting at the altar? There’s a story about a young woman whose cellphone rings just as she’s presented to Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. “You’d better answer it,” the queen said. “It might be someone important.”
You want to know what I did with your gizmos? I recycled their electronic guts and slipped the shells into goodie bags for next week’s Emmys. The reactions to that will be at least as entertaining as anything you could download on an iPod.
