You know that something is really the wave of the future when old-fashioned people actually start trying it, and then rejecting it as just plain too new-fangled. First Virginia Heffernan confesses that she hates her iPhone and its tarty, cutesy face. Then in The Columbus Dispatch, Joe Bundo says he violated his own baffling rule of technology adoption ("Always wait five years, to see whether it will go away on its own") to sign up for Twitter, which his 18-year-old daughter told him he would hate, and which he did in fact hate.
In what sort of hell would you be subjected to the passing thoughts of not only Martha Stewart and Marc Dann but also car dealerships and a building under construction? That hell would be called Twitter.
I find it kind of amusing that he's just repeating everything everyone else has said about Twitter, except he's repeating it way after everyone else has moved on. It's possible that he hated it because he followed ... Martha Stewart and car dealerships, and not interesting, informative people. It's also possible that he didn't see the use because he never ... tweeted.
The pride in unadaptability is baffling to me, and neanderthalism really is not as cute as Bundo seems to think. Technology never "goes away;" it gets replaced by new, better technology. Which we should then ignore for another five years until it's passe and then embrace, while disparaging whatever replaced it? This makes no sense.
And while Bundo still has his job as a columnist, columnist jobs are disappearing thanks to an inability to understand new technology, anticipate the changes it will make, and adapt accordingly. Industries are actually dying while people wait to see if things will magically revert to the way they were five years ago, and these are industries with rich traditions that will leave gaping cultural holes if they don't adapt. I'm not saying anything new of course, but neither is Bundo. His is just a particularly hubristic example, and that's what's so frustrating.
One last parting jab at Mr. Bundo: I found his column through Twitter. I'm hoping for survival of the Twittest.
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