Imagine a world without any technology. No
computers, no TV, no mobile phones. Boring, isn’t it? Yes, there’s no doubt
that technology, in all its many guises, has enriched our lives in countless
ways. As well as electronic entertainment, we have the internet, which enables
us to easily and instantly communicate with people on the other side of the
world; robots that can perform complicated surgery on humans; and GPS built
into phones, which means people with no sense of direction need never get lost
again (in theory). Even the production of this magazine has been enhanced by
computers and DTP software.
Is
that Captain Beefheart you’re playing? No, I’m just telling my mum I’m on the
outside
Sadly, not all technological achievements
are so beneficial to society. Some are just plain awful and fail to take hold,
while others become a victim of their own success, reaching a level of
astoundingly irritating ubiquity – a bit like failed X-Factor contestants and
reality TV shows.
It’s these negative aspects of the
technology – the annoying, the badly designed and the unnecessary – that I want
to look at here. Some of you reading this might hold up your hands in protest
and declare this to be nothing but a list of stuff the writer doesn’t like. To
that, I say yes, that’s exactly what it is. I don’t expect anyone to agree with
every one of my choices here, but maybe you can sympathize with at least one or
two of them.
Key tones
Commuting to work is a painful enough
experience as it is, thanks to the whole getting up before midday thing. The
addition of mobile phone key tones to your morning journey simply pushes it to
a new level of excruciating and unnecessary agony. We all appreciate a gentle
click when turning a dial or flicking a switch, but why, on a touch-screen
device, which is silent by design, do you need to hear a cacophony of tuneless
piano notes or cats meowing every time you touch the damn thing? When your
finger makes contact with the screen, things happen on it. Is that not enough?
Do you really need audible confirmation? No, you don’t, so please give the rest
of the world a break and turn them off.
Remote control dependency
Make
her a cup of tea or you’ll never watch Miss Marple again
In spite of growing up in a time when
infra-red remote controls were the norm, I’m aware that people used to have
wired remotes, which ran from the device they were controlling to their sofa.
Although this idea might seem quaint today, at times it feels like quite a good
idea – specifically when you’re desperately hunting around down the back of
your settee, under books and in cupboards for the ever-elusive remote control,
just so you can do anything at all with your TV. A well-designed television
will have some controls on the set itself, but many are extremely limited in
this regard. Clearly, manufacturers can’t comprehend the possibility that some
people might actually be willing to get off their backsides to change channel
or switch off their TV when The Sarah Millican Television Programme
comes on.
Camera gestures
When you’re sat at your computer, typing a
new status update on Facebook or ordering the Diagnosis Murder boxset,
when it comes time to hit the ‘OK’ button, don’t you just wish instead of
moving your mouse you could wave appointed seventh member of the Village
People? Of course you don’t, but apparently gesticulating wildly in front of a
webcam is now a good way of getting things done. We can probably thank the
Nintendo Wii for this, which made whole body control systems seem like great
fun for approximately five minutes, after which people began to realize that
the whole point of videogames is to make amazing things happen on your TV
without you having to do any more than twiddle your thumbs.
Videogame DLC
Imagine you bought a new house and the
estate agent said, as he handed over the keys, “It’s all yours, apart from that
room at the back. If want it later, though, you can give us another few grand
and we’ll give you the key.” You’d probably laugh in their face, but this is
exactly what games publishers are doing to us with downloadable content. Most
of the time, it’s stuff they’ve already made, but they hold it back so they can
squeeze a few more quid out of the consumer. The Call of Duty
games are terrible for this; not only is the campaign mode getting more and
more pathetically short, Activision charges around $23 for a couple of maps and
no longer allows the modding community to come up with their own.
The caps lock
I
wrote a really funny, insightful caption for this picture, but then I realized
I’d accidentally hit the caps lock key and had to start again
The problem with writing everything in capital
letters is it makes it really hard to read what you’ve written. I’m not saying
the caps lock shouldn’t exist, because there are, no doubt, times when it’s
useful (I’m not sure what they might be, though). However, the placement on the
standard keyboard design is just plain wrong. The two keys above and below it
(tab and shift) are useful, but occupying the space beneath them is this
instrument of the devil, and it’s far too easy to accidentally press it and
type a whole paragraph IN A BIG SHOUTY VOICE. Keyboard makers, do us all a
favor and move it somewhere else.
The ask toolbar
Free software used to mean free software,
but these days there’s far too often a price attached. As you’re gleefully
installing a new zip file manager or even a Java update, you can easily miss
the bit where it says something along the lines of ‘Would you like to install.
The Ask toolbar and search assistant?’ which will then proceed to take over
your web browsers, your search engines and a small corner of your soul, where
it will lurk silently until the rapture, before jumping out and taking your
place in the queue to the afterlife. To be fair, there are far more annoying
and less honest toolbar installers and search hijackers, but Ask’s prevalence
means it makes this list instead of them.
