If you had to forever swear off using all of these recent technologies/developments except one, which would you choose to keep?

Internet, beyond a doubt. I didn't even have to think about it for a second.

do not tease us with hoverboard. do you dangle kitty treats in front of a cat then yank it away and replace it with regular cat food smeared with kitty treat crumbs because you're too cheap to buy more kitty treats?

Internet. An MP3 player is basically useless without it and it would be my second choice.

internet.

Internet. I always eat dirt on my hoverboard. This has made me a minor youtube star, as my pratfalls are so epic, but that doesn't cover the medical bills.

An MP3 player is basically useless without it

No, you just have to have a friend who chose to keep internet. They download stuff for you.

can my butler relay cellphone calls by shouting through silver goblets connected with string?

An MP3 player is basically useless without it

You just have to steal music the old-fashioned way, shoplifting!

silver goblets? yes, I suppose so.

if cellphones disappeared tomorrow i would cheer.

string?

String?! Pah, a real member of the upper classes would use silk thread imported from China. Bloody nouveau riche arrivistes. Peasant!

This down economy is affecting everyone, yo.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

i wld keep cell phone because my cell phone can function as internets and mp3 player

or is that cheating?

Internet. I already don't own any of the others (except an MP3 player, but as I unwisely bought this on ebay from someone who turned out to be in China, it has a battery life of about 25 seconds).

xp tza: I think that's cheating. But what about if you picked internet, would that still mean you could send email over the cell phone, but just not be able to call anyone?

voip?

I could do without an HDTV, esp. since most of the video-watching I do is online nowadays anyway.

And I rarely turn the television on, except to watch CNN or The Colbert Report very occasionally.

Oh, I should've probably read the title of the thread before guessing what we're talking about here.

Well, then. I'd keep the Internet.

internet>cell phone>mp3>wgat was the rest?

yeah that's totally cheating, tehresa

if you kept your cell phone, we'd make sure it's internet and mp3 capabilities were disabled. tuff tittays.

ITS

snoball OTM - the internet covers so much and is so unique, the rest of these are just toys/crappy updates of previous technology

internet is the only one who doesnt have a substitude.

then i need to change my vote!
i don't even talk on the phone ever.
new poll!

the cell phone is good for mundane crap like calling tow trucks, fending off panhandlers, and checking to see what someone wants at the store.

i hope none of u actually VOTED "internet"

I just voted internet, especially for you.

Y'all could totally cope without internet if you had some flunky to do your googling and boggling for you, like how rock stars do.

internet obv tho cell phones are super rad too

theoretically u could get some lil ipod touch w/3g type device and run voip through that - or would that be cheating

xp Philip: Jell0 B1afra does this. He has his employees fax him emails.

if i worked for him id just fax him a note saying: fuck u

Or you could fax him all the spam. ...

cell phones are #1 on my kill list. talk about a technology that creates more problems/obligations

they completely remove the obligation to plan anything ever which is mainly why i love them - also txtn!

the obligation to talk on the phone, removed

apart from remembering to charge the damn thing, I don't think cell phone ownership has done this for me. I'm someone who loathed them for a long time.

boggling!

you can play boggle online?

haha. cel phones are great for avoiding obligations
"ah shit, i had it turned off."
"ah shit, out of batteries."
"ah shit, i lost it."
"[looks at callerid] ah shit my celphone's about to be turned off"

Oh man does b1afra also ahve flunkies to google people talking smack about his email faxing?

I dunno ... I just heard the story from a friend of a friend who works for him.

For those of you who hate/d cell phones, what are/were your reasons for hating them?

they make it "ok" to be late. "oh hi yah i'm running a bit late will be there in 20". fuck you!

ledge, I totally agree with you there.

I also really hate text messaging. A few years ago I noticed my friends sending them to other friends who weren't there when we were hanging out together, and I thought this was rather rude. Aren't you supposed to pay attention to the person you're with? I guess it doesn't matter anymore to younger people, but I feel like something's lost in face-to-face interaction when someone's only sort of engaged in the moment (see: continuous partial attention). I'm probably going to disable my phone's SMS capabilities just so I'm not a part of the problem. And because 99% of anything anyone sends me via SMS is useless, and enough useless information is thrown at all of us today that, if I can prevent any of it, I probably should.

I have never sent a text message in my life.

internet. i still think cell phones are annoying, even after i've grudgingly joined the 21st century.

60+% of the reason I don't have a cell phone is they are way outside my budget.

one good thing about cell phones is that i can avoid creeps by having pretend conversations when walking or taking transit

I would rather keep HDTV because it has been less of a bad influence on me than the internet has been, and cellphones bother me (even though I have one and use it exclusively).

haha cell phones/sms are only annoying when other people do them. how would you guys feel if only 10 people in the world had them, and you were one of them
(like back in the 50s where they had those garmongous sat-phones)
then you'd be all "bitchin!"

I just got my broken cell phone fixed, but while it was down, those two phoneless weeks were HEAVEN. I love dropping off the grid.

Sometimes I wonder if my life would be better without a constant connection to the net. Have been on trips recently of a week or more with no internet and it felt great!

Probably one of the best decisions I've made in recent years is to close my bloglines account.

I had to look up what a hoverboard is. :-/

i bet hoverboards would be just as annoying as cellphones if every kid had one.

how would you guys feel if only 10 people in the world had them, and you were one of them

probably sick of like 24/7 "can I use your phone? it's an emergency"

i guess the problem with technology is other people...

if there was only some technology to destroy them all...

Armageddon Two:

Probably one of the best decisions I've made in recent years is to close my bloglines account.

Why?

i without a doubt would rather keep internet. if this was supposed to be the beginning of a whole new me though, i'd get rid of everything but the botox and try to meet some girls

Also, Armageddon Two, do you feel like you're missing out on anything in not using an RSS reader?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

For those of you who hate/d cell phones, what are/were your reasons for hating them?

* "Yeah, hi. I'm on the bus. Yeah, on the bus. ON THE BUS."
* Ringtones
* The idea of being contactable everywhere (I don't even like answering the normal phone unless I know before hand who it'll be)
* In 10 years, everyone will have brain cancer

kshighway - Well, it was just overwhelming. If you get a couple of blogs in there that average 20+ posts a day, then you hit 100+ a day easily, step away from the computer for a weekend or go on a trip or whatever and it's easily in the hundreds to thousands. The signal to noise ratio is also really shitty too.

I don't feel as I've missed anything - in fact I feel liberated, in a way, in not having to keep up with the tastes and opinions of the blogosphere. ILM is a much better culler of music; sure, I've probably missed a lot of great stuff but at the same time I've found a lot of great stuff just pursuing my own interests.

I'm also about as far away as you can get from a news/politics junkie; I enjoy the funny headlines on Drudge and that's about it.

He also has a site with funny headlines?

For those of you who hate/d cell phones, what are/were your reasons for hating them?

The acme of my loathing was around 1998 - 2000, when I associated them with annoying yuppies and conspicuous consumption. It was during the height of the dot-com boom in San Francisco, and it was definitely a signifier of "them."

The thing that bothered me most, apart from that, was how they served to behaviorally privatize public space. On a cell phone, someone is less conscious of their surroundings and other people, in effect it creates a bubble around the user. And I found it absurd at the time, that people on cell phones would expect others to see and respect that bubble. I really liked the theory that cell phones caused brain cancer on a conceptual level.

cell phones are really not responsible for people having bad manners sry

I had about 3 or 4 friends who equally loathed cell phones at the time, and we joked about things to do to aggravate people on cell phones, or creative projects on the subject. We all have cell phones now.

cell phones aren't responsible for people having bad manners and guns aren't responsible for people being angry.

I hated cell phones at the time for the same reasons and have one now.

ipods are way worse as far as that bubble-effect goes.

ipods are way worse as far as that bubble-effect goes.

I don't see ipods as any different from walkmen and discmen, as far as that goes. The thing with people talking on cell phones and the bubble thing, is that they are having an audible conversation in public (when used in public, obviously) but more often than not their behavior was as if they were in a private space. In other words they created a bubble around themselves that was intrusive to others' space, which for me at the time felt like:
http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/q-prisoner-rover-1.jpg

if people would just learn to talk not loud itd solve a lot of problems in the world

it should be mentioned that one of the huge complaints about the telephone itself was that it was an invasion of privacy to have some one be able to reach you in your home - a lot of people simply refused to get them

ipods aren't any different than walkmen/discmen - but they're omnipresent in a way that earlier things weren't. it's a lot harder to have any sort of interaction with, say, someone at a bus stop, when 50% of people in a city are functioning as if they were deaf.

shut up I can't hear the Walkmen

James Morrison: I don't like the idea of people being able to contact me no matter where I am either. This is why I often just leave my cell phone in another room for the greater part of the day. And, yes, ringtones are awful. I keep my phone on vibrate.

Armageddon: Couldn't agree more with you when you say "The signal to noise ratio is also really shitty too." Right now I'm subscribed to 72 feeds in Google Reader, and at least 80% of what shows up there isn't even interesting, and this is *after* I've culled the feeds so that I'm just pulling in information from sources I care about. Perhaps this just shows that I haven't done enough culling.

I also love your statement that "I don't feel as I've missed anything [...] I've probably missed a lot of great stuff but at the same time I've found a lot of great stuff just pursuing my own interests." I bet my and many people's use of RSS is motivated by a feeling of wanting to avoid exactly that: missing anything. But there's an absurd amount of information out there today, in the form of blog posts, mp3s, videos, etc., and you can't keep up, even if you have a very specific set of interests you're trying to keep track of. Just try to keep abreast of developments in indie rock, and that will be a full time job, assuming you're willing to ignore other important fields like politics, current events, etc.

sarahel: I couldn't agree with you more when you say "The thing that bothered me most, apart from that, was how they served to behaviorally privatize public space." One of the things that bothers me most about now is how much the private has become public. Look at Facebook. The shit some of my friends post to the News Feed -- that they broadcast to everyone on their friends list -- is terrifying. Absurdly personal details of their lives out for everyone to consume. It's really childish and uncomfortable.

I also just want to restate how much I despise SMS. No, you cannot carry on a serious conversation with me in 160 characters at a time. It takes two hours to have what would have been a five to ten minute conversation on the phone.

if people would just learn to talk not loud itd solve a lot of problems in the world

so amazingly true