Demise of wall clocks

In the foyer where the giant teddy bear with its lifeless gaze is watching crowds below, parents take pictures of their children with cellphones. Travellers from all over the world are buzzing about in the airport. This place feels like an extraterrestrial space station with air conditioners protecting humans from hostile desert weather outside. There is even a small botanic garden inside.

Battered by a fourteen hour flight, standing there before the final leg of our journey, we were happy regardless. We moved to an area where people watched an electronic display of flight schedules. 

I don’t wear a wristwatch. 

My cellphone was still showing Sydney time. I wanted to know what the local time was. 

I looked around, high ceilings, giant columns, gorgeous shop windows, shrines of Italian fashion brands, the giant teddy bear, and the flight schedule display, but no sign of a wall clock anywhere. 

Remembering gorgeous Swiss railway clocks and their imitations, I wonder what happened to them. 

We used to have wall clocks in foyers. They were useful artefacts of the analog age. If your mechanical wristwatch failed or you didn’t own one, you could always count on wall clocks. They were revered, communal objects.

With the rise of cellphones, we forgot wall clocks. 

Apple initially used the Swiss railway clock design without permission in iOS 6. Although the exact details of the licensing agreement are confidential. It was reported that Apple ultimately paid Swiss national rail operator SBB about CHF 20M (about US$ 22.4M as of January 2014) to license the use of the clock design. Apple later removed the design from its operating system with iOS 7 (Source: Wikipedia)

The cellphone clock is useful, precise, and doesn’t require readjusting. But cellphones are multifunctional devices, and displaying time is a demoted function. The clock is permanently present on the home screen and sometimes on the status bar. However availability of local time depends on the Location service that may not be available when you don’t have Internet access. That is often the case in airports.

My eyes scanned the flight display, no trace of the local time. 

Five minutes passed. Next to a label “Local Time” at the bottom of the flight display I saw a tiny digital clock. 

A deep sigh followed. 

Drop your sandbags

Liberation came when I decided to quit Facebook.

What started as a simple desire to share ideas, talk about progressive politics, and in between share a few jokes or youtube links in a virtual world came to an abrupt end.

My interest to Facebook started to feel like as if my body was stuck under a pile of colossal machinery designed for self gratification.

I don’t intend to put down people who use Facebook. I think everybody must have different reasons and capacity to commit their time and energy into it.

What I naively expected was intelligent conversations -no pun intended-.

Instead what I ended up having were some ‘Like’s, ‘Hahaha’s, ‘LOL’s and plenty of nothing. People did not bother to respond or interact as much as I wished them to do so.

Frankly writing on blank whitewash walls in a prison cell would have had the same effect.

Well, this must be the way Facebook works then. People share shallow sketches of their boring life -mine included-, and great majority of users seem hardly capable of putting their energy into anything other than sharing a few photos or videos someone else made.

I now regained time, momentum, focus, control, vitality and desire to pursue my private projects.

Strongly recommended..

To liberate yourself, drop your sandbags.

How we lost it

This is from Neil Tyson's tweet:

Causes of death worldwide in March 2011 - Starvation: 3,000,000. Malaria: 250,000. CarCrash 100,000. Quakes&Tsunamis < 28,000

It seems we are not really worried about human suffering or deaths. We selectively hear interesting stories, stage-lights, the drama, the headlines, a record breaking quake, a tsunami, nuclear accidents and we still pretend that we understand and share human suffering.

Well we don't. All we care about is our fat bottoms. Someone else's drama makes our entertainment.

And media wouldn't sell if there was no demand.

How awfully we lost it.

War and Peace

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace has 1,225 pages. How many Twitter users do you think would read 1,225 pages?

Not that they would not read because they would be bored, but since Lev Tolstoy died in 1910, their grey matter must have evolved in such a way that its software perhaps lost ability to appreciate 1,225 pages of a masterpiece.

The other day on TV I watched a young man camping overnight (literally with a tent) outside Apple Store at George Street. He looked like a crack addict as journalists interviewed him. He wanted to be the first man to buy the newest generation of iPhone 4GS that is known to have a faulty antenna design.

A friend of mine sent me a web site link called igniteshow.com. The site advertises itself as:

“Ignite is a geek event in over 100 cities worldwide. At the events Ignite presenters share their personal and professional passions, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of just five minutes.”

I watched one of the videos. A Chinese-American girl trembling with anxiety for catching up the five minute deadline, dropped her text on the floor, talked like a puppet, a soulless speech filled with statistics, uninteresting and torturous. She looked like a biology lab mouse trapped inside a labyrinth.

All these show one thing.

We became gadget-obsessed anxiety-driven freaks and our urban society is running on a short attention span culture.

Just about everybody, every hardware device, and every software on the Internet is desperately trying to grab the shortest possible time span dedicated to comprehension and expression.

Mobile phone became anything but a phone. It is now a complex device designed to shorten your attention span.

It beeps, it vibrates, it rings, it animates, it flashes, it scrolls, it plays. Ah yes occasionally people talk with it.

If texting or gaming is not enough we tweet, or re-tweet, or 'like', or follow, or stop following, or post a url, or post a YouTube link, or change security settings, or read RSS feed summaries , or email on GMail, or forward an email, or reply an email, or subscribe or register to a web site with a user name and password, or search Google, or search Google Images, or search Google News, or, or, ... Oh hell! I am tired.

I don’t even think anyone would be reading this blog post (not that I care), it is too long.

We look like hyper active monkeys trapped behind zoo walls desperately anxious and hopelessly discontent.

I think I am going to buy a thick book and read it. It may as well be Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.