Skunk Totem's Blog: A Twitter-Free, Facebook-Free Zone

I'm sick of Twitter and Facebook. More accurately, I'm sick of the craze that seems to obligate everyone to use social networking. Fans even dare to assert that shunning Facebook is a kiss of death to your career. It reminds me of the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated!"

At least the Borg are fiction.

I hope that Twitter and Facebook go the way of CB radio. (CB remains the ideal communications medium for truck drivers and volunteer emergency responders; it just isn't a dictatorial fad like in the late 1970s. So I'm not wishing TW and FB out of existence)

I'm hardly alone. Read this Omaha World-Herald article on the Slow Media Movement. It quotes and journalism professor Jennifer Rauch: "The movement attracts people who feel 'that some sort of boundaries need to be set;' that technologies should be chosen, not embraced blindly; should serve, not be served."

No, I don't drive a '72 Pinto with an 8-track player. I don't have a black-and-white TV. And if I hated the Internet, you wouldn't be reading this. But I am content with my Stupid Phone and a computer that must be plugged in. If I wrote books, I'd have them available on Kindle (but I read the old fashioned kind: no batteries required.) I, Ms. Rauch, and other "Slow Media" advocates bristle that we are Luddites or even "anti-broadband." We just want to take our technology in smaller doses. I love peanut butter, but that doesn't mean I want three pounds of it in one sitting or to put it on everything I eat.

Forget Nostradumbass prophecies: I figure we'll be doomed when the Old Order Amish are on Facebook.

Stop the iTrain! I wanna get off!

An article in switched.com (it's also in today's AOL News) details a new car stereo by the Blaupunkt company that, according to the text, may render the CD player extinct. Basically it plays music off SD or MMC memory cards (iPod users use a universal input jack).

And how long will it be before this thing's obsolete? I wouldn't be surprised if it's decades before the unit itself wears out.

I'm very techno-ignorant. To me, SD means either South Dakota or standard deviation (a statistical term from my scientist days), while MMC is the Roman numeral version of 2100. This new stereo would sure beat my 1990 Oldsmobile's factory radio/cassette player, which doesn't work at all after getting a tape stuck in its craw. I'm using an even more archaic boombox behind the front seat for a radio (its cassette deck bit the dust, too). But electronic technology has become a runaway train that seems to be gaining speed with no end in sight.

My old Win95 computer works fine but no new software is available for it. New versions software comes out faster than you can learn the old ones. And it seems I heard somewhere that television sets won't work unless they're HDTV. And am I going to have to going to switch to Blu-Ray before I've even amassed more than a half-dozen DVDs?

C'mon, world, slow down. We've got more important things to do than trying to stay ahead of this race.