Thursday, January 10, 2008

On Gadget Overload and Feeling Powerless

From the New York Times:

When my 10-year-old daughter walked through the front door after receiving her first cellphone a couple of weeks ago, my house rebelled. It had quietly endured the abuse of many holiday seasons in a gadget-loving family. Over the years, the house had become filled with obsolete modems, MP3 players and computer monitors as big as dorm refrigerators.

Every drawer, every shelf and every closet was bursting with electronics.

Now, Clementine unboxed her phone and started looking for somewhere to store her transformer thing. But when she opened the junk drawer in the kitchen, long-forgotten power cords attached to other mysterious transformer things sprang out in great looping tangles.

And when I checked for space in the hall closet, cardboard boxes and instruction manuals rained down from a shelf. And I knew it was no coincidence when a dead iPod tripped me on the basement stairs.

As I rubbed my bruised shin, I murmured softly, so only the house could hear, “O.K., you win.”

My New Year’s resolution was to clear out the electronic junk.

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