iPhonatics

It’s Thursday night. As I approach 5^th avenue right before central park, I see the inevitable crowd. It’s a sea of faces-some illuminated with delightful anticipation, some crusting with a lack of sleep. Some nestled under cozy quilts. Some bubbling with energy. The perpetual chatter lights up the avenue with all kinds of crazy stories, questions, deep dreams, partyers, crowd-pleasers, drunkards, nerds, black people, white people, beige, orange, purple and the occasional shameless dancing-lunatic-weirdo. “Party Rocker” boomed out of a stereo system, competing with the sound of two 20-something girls near the back violently barking at each other about who was ahead of who. A reporter and his camera man hover around the bustling crowd. “How long have you been waiting here for?” He asks a group of guys. “Seven hours.” A bystander walking down the block turns to her friend and says, “Wow. All this for a phone.” Within 10 minutes, the line had wrapped around several blocks. I can’t think of a more interesting way to learn about business, sociology and calculus than to stand and watch thousands of people lining up for the iPhone 5.

1. I learned how marketing makes people feel that they “have to have it first”
http://www.apple.com/iphone/videos/ – tv-ads-physics

2. I learned how technology brings thousands of strangers together
http://www.blogcdn.com//media/2012/09/applefifthave92112.jpg

3. And most importantly, I learned “at what rate, in people per second, is the crowd accumulating when f(x) = (25cos(x) – 60pi (tan(4x))/(5.328x – sqrt71)

Just kidding.

Welcome to the technological revolution. We are dots and numbers on a timeline that will go in a history book to eventually represent ‘the generation of iPeople’.  Yes, I envy the people who got to live through the ‘bodacious 60’s’ and the Disco Decade, but nothing compares to seeing first-hand the phenomenon that’s taking place in the dawning of the 21^st century. iPhones, iPads, MacBooks are everywhere. In Starbucks you’ll see people writing their novels on their laptops while nonchalantly sipping an iced Caramel Macchiato. No offense to anyone who uses address books, but who uses them anymore? When someone asks for your number, they will most likely hand you their phone. And then you see 5-year-old kids on the train keeping busy with Angry Birds as their mothers read 50 Shades of Grey on the Kindle or iPad. Even in our very own Baruch BUS1000H lecture hall, a sea of silver MacBook Pros light up the room, all aligned like windows of a building at night. A few years ago I read an article about an author whose handwriting became completely illegible because he wrote everything with the keyboard. It makes me wonder—how long until pencils and paper become totally obsolete?

Technology fascinates me.

Technology fascinates toddlers too, apparently. Whenever I babysit my cousins, I have to make an extra effort to hide my iPhone from my four year old cousin. Otherwise, she will hog it for literally two hours and spam my camera with photos from Camwow, an app that distorts photos to make them look funny. So if I hear perpetual hysterical laughter for an abnormal amount of time, it is a certain indication that my phone has been hijacked.

The first time I babysat Joey (from a different family), he pulled me over to look at his dinosaurs. He took his daddy’s iPad off the charger and pulled up a picture book of dinosaur diagrams with no words. “That’s Brachylophosaurus. That’s Stegosaurus. Giganotosaurus….” And he continued to leave me in awe as he pronounced the names perfectly from his memory. Oh, and he’s about six. That moment lowered my self-esteem to a sad level.

Fact of the matter is, this 21^st century American culture is immersed in the technology era. It’s interesting every now and then to take a step back from the hustle and bustle of the city to simply observe how connected we all are. And how silly we are.