I don’t normally write about journalism, but this annoyed the fuck out of me: a blog-post-turned-magazine-feature-article in which the NYT’s Virginia Heffernan bitches about a device because she couldn’t master it in less than twenty-four hours.
N.B. Heffernan is their blogger for the ongoing confluence of all digital media, especially the Web-TV meld. This shouldn’t preclude her from slamming an inferior product, of course, but there’s a right way and a wrong way, and she—well, you’ll see. Here’s how it starts:
The iPhone was charging. Refined, introverted, mysteriously chilled, my new $200 tile of technology lay supine on a side table, gulping power from the wall.
Actually, the iPhone probably sips, like a lipsticky girl with a vodka drink. It usually does things in a cute way. Whatever. At 4 in the morning, I was in bed, fighting rage. I couldn’t stop thinking about that device’s tarty little face and those yapping “apps” you can download for it.
Really! Those “introverted” machines—as opposed to, you know, the outgoing, social ones—are the worst. Sometimes, Heffernan goes on to explain, they’re so introverted and chilly that they’re alcoholic sluts who make getting a boyfriend that much harder for all the intelligent, human women out there. Which is the only possible reason these pangs of anger and jealousy are keeping her awake at 4 am. Think about this. She is claiming that her new phone was so annoying SHE COULD NOT SLEEP. That’s nothing but a blatant lie.
And don’t even get her started on the yapping apps, because either
A) She doesn’t know what the word “yapping” means
B) She’s experiencing the auditory hallucinations common to paranoid schizophrenics
C) She thought the rhyme was cute
Speaking of which, don’t forget the scare quotes around “apps,” lest you accidentally lose touch with your bitter teenage sarcasm for one sentence.
As an added bonus, this lead-in proves she never even cracked the manual, which would have told her not to leave the iPhone charging overnight.
… really, my enthusiasm survived right up to the moment at the AT&T counter, post-sale, when a saleswoman transferred my address book from my battered BlackBerry to the sweetie-pie iPhone.
“Can you set up my e-mail too?” I asked. She handed me the phone and told me what to type. Pressing her good nature, I asked if she’d do that part too, since I wasn’t yet handy with the iPhone’s character-entry system — the 2D screen-based simulation of the qwerty keyboard.
She gave me a hard look. Truly, as if she was supposed to be on the lookout for people like me. “It’s your phone,” she replied briskly. “It’s time you started typing on it.”
It’s time. She was like a nurse for newborns, urging me — a new mother — to step up and change a diaper or something. And I felt just like a sullen new mom, not ready for her role. “Can you just do it this one time?” I said weakly. She poked in the necessary codes.
Oh, now I get it: she’s not in a dating-pool competition with an oversexed iPhone; the iPhone is actually the mewling newborn she wishes she’d aborted and is already thinking about smothering. Because heaven forbid she explain her relationship to this inanimate piece of circuitry with an analogy that doesn’t place women in the worst possible light.
P.S., who does that AT&T cunt think she is? As we’ve already established, Heffernan is too good for the manual that might’ve helped her out on the e-mail settings, which require about as much skill to maneuver as did acquiring the woefully.underqualified@nytimes.com address in the first place, i.e. none.
There were warning signs. I didn’t rush to explore the phone or load it up with apps. I didn’t fantasize about its features, as I did with the feedable Baby Alive doll when I was 6 or with my first Macintosh, when I was 19. Instead, the iPhone stayed in my bag. A hard weight with glossy surfaces, it kept aloof from the animal warmth of my leather wallet. I didn’t even face the iPhone again until it rang, or chimed — or produced some audio confection that seemed cloyingly churchy.
You can see I wasn’t thinking clearly. To answer the phone, I had to touch the screen. Years of not touching screens — so as not to smudge or scar — made me wary.
Yes, it’s always a bad omen when your new gadget doesn’t bring you to orgasm the instant you drop it in your purse, staying separate from all the other junk in there instead of—what? melting into your wallet to form some completely different object? Making friends with it? Unsurprisingly, the default ring is an annoyance—unlike all other phones, which are automatically set to pipe in a sweetly effervescent and unique cello phrase played live by Yo-Yo Ma, wherever he happens to be at that exact moment.
A screen you can touch?! Having not been to a children’s museum since 1992, I guess that came as quite a shock. In any case, the NYT’s mobile media person, instead of faulting a tech development in any reasonable terms, here expresses her vague distrust of change in general. Well done.
What did I know of this wacko kind of typing? I spent my adolescence touch-typing, convinced my life would be passed secretarially, my left pinkie building novelty muscle manning the A. Then the technology changed, and I improvised an inelegant three-finger style for computer keyboards.
Then years ago, when I bought a BlackBerry, I adapted again. My two hands met as if in prayer, as the thick thumbs took center stage. I liked it. Thinking with my thumbs made sense in a way that thinking with nails and feebler fingers never would or did. And the transformation of thumb-twiddling into typing! Nervous motion was turned productive, as it is in knitting or whittling. Ingenious.
Oh, God. I really was losing it. As I composed my running-late text, the iPhone’s iciness deepened my revulsion. Did this device, which was built never to be cradled, ever warm up? I was also mortified by my illiteracy. My right index finger — the only digit precise enough to hit the close-set virtual iPhone keys — seemed an anemic, cerebral thing, designed for making paltry points in debating club. I repeatedly stabbed to the right of my target letter. It was like being 4 again — or being 90. I couldn’t see, it seemed; I couldn’t point; I couldn’t connect.
This part left me nearly breathless: Ms. Heffernan loves typing with her thumbs, as she did on the BlackBerry, yet doesn’t even try this technique on the iPhone (where it works rather well), presumably because she is both an illogical ex-TV critic with gravel for brains and wanted another three paragraphs worth of material for the edgy, anti-consensus blog post she was planning to write.
I refused to fight further with the smug phone. Off sailed my text — the work of a blithering idiot.
No comment.
At breakfast, my colleague said she loved her iPhone. She insisted my typing would improve, but she clearly has more native index-finger skills than I do. I asked her if she thought the iPhone was “coy” or “cold,” and she looked at me blankly. As I spoke I felt like a chippy freak — one of those people too intransigently cranky even to like Barack Obama, or recycling, or the Internet. I thought of how clearly the iPhone suits the moment: Apple once again getting ahead of the game, offering something cuter and funner and more Appley than anyone else.
The failure to appreciate the iPhone was all mine. But I decided not to dwell on that. “I thought you might be back,” the AT&T saleswoman said as I walked in the door. “So?” I said. “You were right.” With some satisfaction, she took the iPhone, and I walked away with a new BlackBerry and money to spare.
Cool! In the end she discovers that she is indeed projecting weird personal shit onto a dead mass of microchips and apparently decides the world needs to know about this borderline psychotic infatuation anyhow. Because she is so totally different; she is a true outsider in this age, and you just don’t get it, man.
I’d be the first to list the iPhone’s drawbacks, so I hope you won’t think I’m being defensive here. But this kind of writing should shame everyone involved with it—it’s shallow, contrary for the sake of contrariness and secretly self-aggrandizing. If you’re gonna be a hater, you’re gonna have to hate better than this.
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bdc reblogged this from thenotes and added:
People to read: Miles People to avoid reading:...woefully.underqualified@nyt.com
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