

Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones - shalmanese
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/magazine/19wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1

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mechanical_fish
Damn and blast, _where_ is the podcast of the Bruce Sterling SXSW talk? It
doesn't appear to be up here yet:

<http://sxsw.com/taxonomy/term/44>

I'm tired of all these bits-and-pieces leaks. Sterling's one-liners are much
more fun -- and often make rather more sense -- in context.

I suppose, if I had been willing to spend more money, I could have just gone
to SXSW and heard Sterling in person. But, instead, I have to wait like a
mendicant for them to get around to dribbling it out to me. Maybe this is what
Sterling was talking about.

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abstractbill
This reads more like a comparison of "old money" and "new money" to me, than
of rich and poor. I have more than one rich friend who would hate to be
disconnected.

~~~
idiopathic
Actually, it sounds more like a restatement of the Theory of the Leisure
Class:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class>

(This is a wonderful book by the way, and it was recommended to me by a Chief
Marketing Officer. Reading it on his recommendation was the first time I
realized he was actually quite smart.)

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maigret
Of course poor people love their cell phones! But rich people too (even more
sometimes)... And what's the point? How you use Twitter is a pretty different
story. I find the article has a pretty strange structure anyway, I'm sort of
searching the point the writer wants to make. Some more tweeting could help
the author to get more concise maybe :)

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_pius
The article was thought-provoking for me, as I hadn't heard the Sterling talk,
but she lost me here:

 _I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is
transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re
curious ...._

 _I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck
in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular
beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of
this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do:
among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious,
irreplaceable objects._

And what is stopping her from doing that? Her Twitter usage seems to be very
much self-promotional and one way, so it's not as if she's leaving a community
she has a stake in. What's she whining about?

~~~
abrahamsen
>> in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.

> And what is stopping her from doing that?

Lack of money, perhaps? Even the non-material first part

>> among family and friends

can be difficult if everyone are busy making ends meet.

~~~
_pius
She was speaking metaphorically.

~~~
_pius
Surprised someone downmodded me for this one. If you actually read the
article, she wasn't literally talking about living in an overcrowded
neighborhood and wanting to move to a big, secluded house; she was talking
about feeling bombarded with tweets and wanting to get out of the
Twittersphere, where she's not really well accepted.

You know, writers sometimes use these things called "metaphors" to make their
points more interesting ... :P

~~~
abrahamsen
Context is everything, in this case the context is Sterling's assertion that
connections is for poor people. So the context is rich versus poor. "A big,
secluded house" is correctly a metaphor, but a shallow one, namely for living
the style of life of rich people. Something that really is a whole lot easier
if you have a lot of money.

This makes your original question seem weird, you are basically asking "What
prevents her from living like a rich person?". The answer to that one is
obviously "Lack of money".

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cmars232
The key word in Sterling's quote is 'dependence'. I can use these services
without becoming _dependent_ on them. They're useful, so is whatever I'm
reading while I'm on the can.

I don't know, maybe it means more to all those motivational self-help and
internet marketing types on Twitter.

One of the great advantages I see in microblogging is the ability to walk in
and out of the "attention stream" at leisure. Try that with IM and you're
considered rude or strange.

Of course, some probably have a harder time walking away than others.

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Adam503
Bruce Sterling "Poor folk love their cellphones."

"Poor folk" don't have cellphones. They can't afford them.

~~~
rarestnews
My friend told me the other day he was in a bus, and there he saw a very poor
immigrant who was talking on his cell whole trip. I thought this was weird and
unusual, but he told me he saw similar thing lots of times. Many of my friends
who earn little, spend ALL of their money on unnecessary purchases, like
newest cellphones, newest clothing, etc, they're deep in debt and continue
spending this way.

~~~
Adam503
There's some really incredible things people say "a friend of theirs saw."
Here's a regularly updated page with 25 of those things people swear their
friends were eyewitness to...

<http://www.snopes.com/info/top25uls.asp>

~~~
rarestnews
Kudos for bringing it up. Now we have a conspiracy to find the elusive poor
guy with a cellphone. Maybe next decade we'll develop a
cryptomobilanthropology hunting for the unbelieveable miracle of elusive poor
guy talking on a cell phone hiding in foggy woods and out-of-focus areas.

Kudos, Adam503, keep up the good work debunking the greatest mysteries of our
time!

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yesimahuman
I like the web and connectivity because I like making shit, he doesn't address
the developer side of it all.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_he doesn't address the developer side of it all_

Well, not to put too fine a point on it: We're a vanishingly small percentage
of humanity.

What we think about the web is disproportionately important, because people
who build the web have a certain amount of power to control how people use it
by tweaking the design. But, ultimately, we don't get to choose how the medium
is used, any more than the makers of the atomic bomb got to choose how _that_
was used... or the people who write music and books get to decide how their
work will be reviewed and who will quote from it.

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haseman
Bruce Sterling seems to have confused his concepts of "Rich" and "Old" Old
people dislike connections, hide in private gardens. There are plenty of
"Rich" people who live to sip from the firehose that is the internet...

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c00p3r
Nothing special - all those cheap digital illusions (TV and now its successor
- Internet) were adapted especially for the poor, targeted to the poor, and
massively advertised to them. It just works, and now we can see the results.

