My phone is dumb and the only pad I have around the house presently is of the steno variety. I offer this not as evidence of any sort of anti-techno bias necessarily, but mostly in the context of these things being awfully expensive. Can someone please explain to me why all my broke friends who are broke like me can afford all these expensive toys when they are broke? Does broke mean something different to them? Something other than not having enough money to buy stuff that looks like fun but isn’t really essential?
So, that’s the perspective, freely admitted, by which I relay the information that Rovio Mobile, the company behind Angry Birds, the phone and iPad video game designed to implant a desire to use addictive drugs in my child’s mammalian brain, has now raised $42 million to develop other evil-yet-fun games of little worth but great compulsive effect.
Or hadn’t you heard? Perhaps you were too busy lining up to buy your “new generation” iPad (translation: same-same but white).
I’d be offended by your comment about poor people affording expensive toys if it weren’t so true. I even ordered an iPad2 for myself.
Michael–I’m going to insist, at least for the purposes of this post, on a distinction between “broke” and “poor.” While the two terms may in some sense be analogous, I think they have very distinct connotations. A “broke” person, in my view, can hold a laughing debate about how his or her money is spent. A poor person has to make real-world, real-time choices about expenses that aren’t funny. Poor, in the American sense, conveys a certain kind of class designation. It can be viewed as bigoted that in a consumerist society like this one, where products carry such heavy identity weight, that saying poor people shouldn’t enjoy consumer products is equal to saying they shouldn’t be members of society. It’s putting poor people in their place, in a way. Broke, as it’s used here, really only refers to cash-strapped members of the middle class. That too betrays a class bias, and you can read it any direction you like (I’d wager that most readers of this blog are in some way part of the middle class). But a poor person really could take offense at my attempts at humor. A broke person just laughs along. –theodore.
Now that Theodore has thread-jacked his own post, I can point out that John Scalzi has a great description of what it means to be poor in the US, which is quite different than poverty in other countries, but just as soul-crushing.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
Scottstev: that link, I think, sums up what I mean pretty well: iPad-grief mildly funny (in my opinion); Goodwill underwear, not so much. –Theodore. Also: what does “thread-jacked” mean?
That means you took one conversation and hijacked in another direction. Although: does it could if you started the first conversation in the first case?