Priorities

There is a lady on my tube who has an iPad and is using it to read the Metro. It's a free paper, there's one behind her on the seat. Am I missing something? Is this like when people wait for a rush-hour tube at Bank, squeeze themselves on it and then get off at Liverpool Street? It's five minutes walk away, you could have actually saved yourself time as well as the unpleasant sensation of being crammed into a train at rush-hour!
To me this typifies our relationship with technology: we will use it at every opportunity, regardless of whether it is to our benefit.
The recent demise of Steve Jobs led to a plethora of articles detailing how he changed the way we use technology, and I would tend to agree, although I am not sure he was by any means alone in this; he was merely one of the more visible and successful practitioners. I am talking of course of technology for which a need is invented rather than technology that is invented to fulfill a pre-existing need. The personal computer was perhaps not the first such technology, but the tablet computer is definitely the latest. Many will argue that the tablet computer will come to fill many roles just as the personal computer has done in the last ten years, and that is undoubtedly true. This can be said about much Jobs-related technology: I wouldn't have time to write this blog if I didn't do it on my smartphone. However, if we look at the services the computer began to provide, they were mainly those that were already provided by other technologies: to become useful, the personal computer had to borrow uses from elsewhere. Is that necessarily a bad thing? If the computer replaces several other devices, surely that is a rationalisation of technology, which is an efficiency and therefore good. However, if to reach the point at which the computer is actually useful in this way, millions, possibly billions of useless computers had to be made and thrown away, how efficient actually is the final product? I understand the need for continual improvement, but is there a difference between developing a product and doggedly plugging away at it until it becomes useful?
The printing press did not do anything new, it just did it in a different way, but the use for it was discovered at the same time as the thing itself, not 20 years later.
Even the car had a clear purpose from its inception, it was just that it took 20 years of improvement to stop it being woefully inefficient and lethal (obviously neither issue has ever been fully resolved). It is the bloody-mindedness of the pioneers of motoring that has become almost a blueprint for the inventors and developers of all subsequent technologies, indeed it is seen as an essential quality of such people. This is fine when it applies to one or two lone practitioners, but when it becomes the attitude of a whole industry the fallout in terms of waste products can be huge. Indeed the legacy of these bloody-minded pioneers is a bloated, blinkered and uni-directional industry that has shunned radical innovation in favour of idiosyncratic aesthetics and masculine fashion. Granted, much of the 'development' in the car industry in the last 30 years has clearly been driven by the single interest of the oil companies, but even without this powerful lobby it is likely that the internal combustion engine would still be at the heart of most cars.
All industry is subject to outside interest and the desire of shareholders to make money - that is the nature of capitalism - but we have arrived at age where the commercial interests of a company are sold to consumers as desirable regardless of the usefulness of the products that are inherent in this transaction. As consumers, we buy into the idea of a product or its lifestyle associations, or even the lifestyle associated with the company that produced it, and it appears that we are increasingly willing to buy the image wholesale. How else can we explain Apple retaining its counter-cultural identity even after becoming the highest valued company listed on Wall Street? So are we as consumers responsible for the products that we end up with, or are we being tricked by a future lifestyle myth? Can the Man exploit the fact that our desires and hopes and dreams are still hopelessly Modern? Is this possibly a failing attributable to the linear nature of our lives? Are we naturally predisposed towards a concept of development as a process of relentless accumulation arrested only by death?
Maybe we are unable to resist the pull of desirable future filled with objects we don't yet have a use for. Maybe we are destined to spend our time finding out whether our iPads are better at opening tins than tin openers.
Of course, my argument can be seen as a little facetious, in that the use of tablet devices to read newspapers and books will reduce the environmental impact of the publication of these tomes in hard copy. But this can only be the case if enough books or newspapers are read to offset the environmental impact of producing the device in the first place before a newer, faster, more desirable version is sold to us and we chuck it on the fadget* graveyard.
It is clear that there is no simple answer to the wastefulness of our production and consumption of technology. Obviously it will help if obsolescence is not built into our technology as standard - and that will require many manufacturers to rethink their business models. However only we as consumers have the power to make them think about these things much more seriously, and that requires us to see beyond the rather childish notion that fagets somehow make us cool. Seriously, I'm over 25, nothing is ever going to make me cool. Indeed, why should it?

* fadget - a faddish gadget - see most modern technology.