Writing a blog entry on the iPhone while en route to Bangalore from Frankfurt isn’t easy, but the fact that I can do it is pretty cool. Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson (of B-52’s fame) are singing “Candy” as I started this using the Notes app (Edit: See below for more on why this was a bad idea), with One Republic now singing “Apologize.” That song, while overplayed, is still one of my recent favorites, although for a while I thought they were saying “It’s too late to phone a judge…” I have no idea why I thought that, but it had me listening to the rest of the song to try to figure out if it was about crime or something.
The confusion over what that song meant leads me to the iFight in the title. I just finished watching the latest episode of Law & Order, downloaded this morning via iTunes just before leaving for the airport, and the subject of the show bothered me. It revolved around street fighting, to the death in some cases, with seemingly ordinary people involved. I won’t give away the plot, but it featured a YouTube-like site where videos of the fights were being uploaded. Law & Order is often said to be “ripped from the headlines,” and in this case it hit (no pun intended) close to home.
I’m a strong believer in personal freedoms and freedom of expression, but stuff like this is a bit too much. I worry about kids seeing this and emulating it, and from the news reports it is already happening. My stepson, age 12, has some restrictions on what he can and can’t do/see on the net and TV, but he surely gets more than he needs. I know that he’s seen things like the “Ultimate Fighting Championship” with his dad, and I can’t control that, but I do try to offer a counter to it. So far he seems to be turning out to be a good kid, and I hope he doesn’t fall prey to peer pressure or media overexposure and get into trouble like some kids do.
As I finished typing that paragraph Johnny Cash came on singing “The Man Comes Around,” which got me thinking more about violence on TV. I first heard that song while watching last season’s finale of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” a show that I enjoy quite a bit. It is often a violent show, which is no surprise given that it’s part of the Terminator franchise, but it doesn’t bother me like real-life YouTube videos and the like. As an adult I think that I have the ability to distinguish between what is obviously fictional (at least I hope that the Terminator storyline is) and what is real-life. Can children make this distinction, or for that matter many supposedly mature adults? While my stepson is an admittedly small sample set, he seems to be similar to many of his friends in terms of his ability to understand what is real or not. I let him watch Lost, Heroes, and a few other PG-13/TV-14 shows and movies, and it’s clear that he doesn’t always get it. That he has less-restricted access while not at our house is worrisome, but it worries me more that there are kids who don’t have any guidance whatsoever.
Well, that was getting a bit heavy, but luckily Journey is now on singing “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which I had on my iPhone before the infamous Team Cyprus Move To Undo “The Video” scandal. (Edit: You can still see the video here despite the best efforts to remove it) If the timing hadn’t been so bad with the markets crashing and all, I think most folks would have laughed at it, or most likely never heard of it. It certainly wasn’t any worse that what went on during the dot-com boom, but way back then we didn’t have YouTube, Twitter, and so on to rapidly spread things around. What I find funny is that they tried to remove it, clearly not “getting” the power of the net despite their being considered the tech elite. This will likely be around forever, thanks in part to the technologies that power the companies they represent, and in some cases pioneered.
After a bit of a break I resumed typing, which is somewhat tedious on the tiny keyboard. Why don’t more apps support the horizontal layout, which is wider and more comfortable? It’s strange to me that Apple can do so many things right, but get a few things very wrong. Where are cut-and-paste and other accelerators and ease-of-use features? The original Mac was cool because it did many of these things so well, yet it seems that they either don’t know how to do them on the iPhone, or are purposely holding back. Weird.
Led Zepplin just came on singing “Kashmir,” which seems somewhat appropriate given that I’m heading to India. I don’t know much about the region, and if the Indian gentleman next to me wasn’t sleeping peacefully I’d ask him. We spoke after boarding and he works for Greenpeace, the first person I’ve ever met from that organization. He’s returning from Amsterdam where he was meeting with tech companies to discuss how they can be greener, reducing their carbon footprints. I’m not really much of an environmentalist in the “activist” sense, but I do believe that the energy problem is the most important one to try to solve. Why? Because if energy is cheap, renewable, and clean, lots of other problems become much easier. I don’t believe that it is going to be easy to “turn back the clock” and vastly reduce our consumption, and it’s going to be hard to convince developing countries that they can’t or shouldn’t grow, which will always require energy. Both US presidential candidates gave this issue plenty of lip service, now lets see if Obama is going to make good on it. I hope he does, and I wish that we’d channel most of our resources and talent into trying to solve this problem.
After Nirvana sang “All Apologies,” a favorite of mine, The Queens of the Stoneage came on with “Long Slow Goodbye,” which may be some sort of cosmic hint to wrap this post up. It seems long on the Notes screen, which probably wasn’t designed for such things, but it works well enough. I’ve got lots of time left and may blog some more, moving on to a more technical subject. (Edit: iTunes can’t sync the notes to a PC, which is stupid, and another one of those things that it is hard to believe Apple can’t or won’t do)
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