Technology Calls Talk Radio

Blah, blah, blah…  Maybe that’s what we sound like to our lesser selves, when we’re not feeling clever.

The sound that our minds hear, when technology is stale, like AM radio.  It’s what happens when technology is no longer exciting or fun.  Luckily, that isn’t the case with our smart technology.

The true ingenuity of apps, isn’t just what they’re capable of doing today but what inventiveness we conjure up tomorrow.  Those applications we add onto our devices to make them uniquely ours, that even if we could, who wouldn’t put back into the box.

How quickly we’d become outraged if we were restricted to the limits of a landline phone!  It would be a little bit like the Prohibition Era, a fertile ground where even the most law abiding citizen would become incorrigible.

It’s not like that with the radio, because the radio is for all practical purposes mostly unchanged.   It’s clung to its form like no other technology.  Here and there a tweak, maybe to bandwidth, or stereo and most recently high definition.  But really, nothing monumental.  It seems as if innovation stayed away; rarely fetching a nod of approval from a futurist because radio is, well unimagined as anything other than what it is, which is odd.  But maybe that’s simply because it’s great technology.

Other than the housing, nothing has changed.  Sure the components have gone from big to small, but the skeletal form has been slow to change.  Copper wire, a crystal, a glass vacuum tube, a solid state transistor and printed board circuitry.  And from this, the new breed of technology, as if it were a testing gorund.

Interestingly our sense of sound, when culled by a radio gets our attention in that old nostalgic way of a family gathered around a radio.  Talk radio and a sports game can engage us, especially when a talented sports announcer does that energetic play by play, colorful analyst.  We “see” the game in our imaginations, through his spoken words.  A gift really.

I’m only thinking about radios now, because I recently read an article that suggested white gaps in mobile technology can be used in low end areas.  Areas like zoos, that aren’t being supported by cellular.  Utilized in those areas where data traffic is in low demand and voice transmission might be beneficial.  Capturing that signal, as it bounces around mountain ranges, in leap-frog fashion across the earth’s curves, travelling along a noisy bandwidth.

It’s the same premise of a radio’s frequency signals, amplitude and modulated that evolved from analog to digital.  Then, like now, bandwidth space became choppy at lower ends, gaps caused white noise and eventually, those spaces were sold.  Think AM talk radio.

Maybe it’s just me, but wouldn’t it be something if we could be more inventive with radio??? In the Digital Age we might be more efficient, and not resort to old timey problem solving, maybe that’s the reason it’s called a communication gap.

Blah-blah-blah…  that’s when we become our lesser  selves, and not up to feeling clever.

Technygal & Me

 

One year ago I started this blog & created a webpage and purchased a domain.  And here we are… still.

There’s a part of me, who wants to pick up my pallet & paint brushes.  To mix paints, colors… like coloring with Crayola crayons.   Except I paint in acrylics.  Thick brush strokes on white canvas, then I could tell a different story in a different way…

Naw, I like my words too much!

See this is where I B’Log 🙂

Mixing Technologies with Metaphors

As revolutionary as the eggbeater was, it was innovation that freed her from the kitchen!

Technology has a certain knack for curbing and flexing time, so that even if we can’t create it, regenerate or domesticate it, we can work to get around it. By getting a task done in less time or arriving at our destination faster and faster.   We’re constantly working in a timeframe, trying not to lament or anguish over the loss of it, but to enjoy life.  After all, there are no life instructions, but if there were one would read:  “Absolutely No Do Overs”.

So gadgets, like the eggbeater, invented with good intentions and far-reaching implications have always been welcomed.  Not only did it efficiently mix ingredients, but it helped to make baking easier, cutting the cooking time to bake a cake in half!

Additional improvements were made to foods, which helped in preparation, including storage and processing.  Key products like sugar, that had proved difficult to use, sold in blocks or sugar cones that had to be cut and then broken into useable pieces were now being purchased in granulated sweetness!  Flour was now being sold pre-sifted, and the ice box, long vulnerable to melting in the summertime, was being replaced with an electric refrigerator.  Fresh eggs stored indoors!

Cooking ovens became more efficient, with a knob that controlled the temperature of the heat.  Gone were the days of baking disasters– open fires and damp fire wood, that flameless smoky soot.  Now the modern woman had the convenience of coal, gas and electricity with which to run her kitchen.  This ease of cooking led to clichés and it changed pop culture, “If I’d knew you were coming I’d a baked a cake,” was not only a song, it was her carefree attitude.

Women were no longer slaves in America’s kitchens chained to temperamental cast iron stoves.  With her new freedom came time to think and she began to join clubs.  Book clubs, garden clubs, philosophical and reading clubs, these seemed to form and sprout up everywhere.  She had time to think, to discuss her thoughts with other women and to reconsider the world, and her place in it, she became politically aware.

That’s innovation!

From electricity, the eggbeater was redesigned with two separate mixing arms and an ejector button that popped them off for easy cleaning.  Women found an additional use, she could quickly release the mixers and use them to pacify a baby.  Many a toddler was plopped in the middle of a kitchen floor and allowed to lick the cake batter from the mixers.

Technology has always valued time, with a monetary value established for a “by the hour” workforce.  Among men there has long been an equal day’s pay for equal work.  Unions made certain that compensation was fair.  But for some odd reason, that hasn’t had cross over appeal, call it gender inequity.

Hmmmm, maybe we’re mixing technology with our metaphors…