Welcome to the Magpie Society!

They tell me that I’m too young to be jaded and cynical about society, but let’s be honest if no-one else is going to be then we are at the beginning of the end. You would be forgiven for thinking that you had stumbled across the post of a pretentious counter-culture blogger, moping around inside with almost translucent skin from lack of sunshine.

However I am a lover of culture in its many forms including technology and our apparent ever growing symbiosis with it. Yes, technology is great and has revolutionised almost every part of our everyday lives, but we are now reaching a point where technology has become a new culture in an almost quasi-religious form. Apple and their devoted following of Apple-ites get a lot of stick in the press and on the internet by those not so symbiotically reliant on the next “i-Innovation”, however I do not feel they are alone in this problem and it is spreading throughout other areas of entertainment technology.

The best example of this at the moment is that of the iPhone 5 and the ‘New’ slimmer PS3 console being released. What is wrong with these you may ask, well it isn’t the products themselves that there is anything wrong with, but more the fact that people will so readily change from their perfectly functioning predecessors for a newer shinier version of what they already have with little noticeable advantageous technological gain. 

 

In the interests of fairness I understand that the IPhone 5 has a new processor, slightly bigger screen and inclusion of LTE 4G. Even so does the improvement merit spending £500 + (Unlocked from Apple) just because it is new and shiny? In my opinion, No. I will tell you why as well, the only real technological point of interest and value in the iPhone 5 is the inclusion of LTE 4G. However this technology will not be available until at earliest the end of this year from the Everything Everywhere group (Orange and T-Mobile), therefore limiting the choice of providers and therefore stifling competition if you want access to this technology first. If you wish to go with another provider who happens to produce the nano-sim that the iPhone 5 takes then you will have to wait a minimum of a year till 4G is available in this country to you, by which time the next iPhone could well be on the horizon.  

I also happily acknowledge that the new slim PS3 will have a bigger hard drive which is useful and a welcome return to a disk drawer. As an owner of an original 60GB PS3 I can attest to the fact that more space to save to can be useful, but the first slim line PS3 addressed this, as well as reducing the size down to a more manageable size from the original. Therefore I can not see the point in reducing it down further unless people are looking at their PS3’s and going “You know what, it is getting fat and taking up more space than when I bought it!”. So it is just another example of cosmetic changes in order to bring out another version of the console, to continue to encourage naive and technologically inept people to buy little Johnnie a “better” version of the console he already has.  

 

They say society has become too materialistic and I used to disagree but on balance after occasions like this I feel you have to wonder what kind of world we live in, where we will spend £100’s yearly on technology because it has been on a diet or is slightly bigger and shinier than the one we already have in our pocket, but won’t help to solve problems easily solved worldwide.

So, in conclusion ‘Welcome to the Magpie Society’ where we get rid of perfectly good technology, for items almost exactly the same but skinnier and shinier.

Nosh, Signing out.