How Much Clunkiness Will You Tolerate?
When you get the cute internet is broken sign once it may be enough to make you smile. When you see the spinning rainbow wheel of limbo for the first time in a day you may be able to excuse it. The Firefox Ellipses are interesting visually for a while. I loved the fail whale. But then you start to wonder — why was so much effort put into making failure aesthetic?
When my phone dies it takes a lot of energy to tell me that it is dying — why not conserve that and just keep it rolling a little bit longer?
I remember when I had a newer TV that went kaput and I was talking to a repair man who had worked on every TV that had been made in the last 30 odd years previous. What he told me was that though the old TVs were much bigger, the great thing about them was that if one part of the machine died it was unlikely to take out its neighbor, because there was much more real estate inside the box — so you could replace just a single part and have the thing up and running. Now? Everything was nestled so closely together that a single fault might take out more than one system, and in such a way that the whole thing became a giant paperweight.
Cars likewise used to be something that you didn’t have to plug a computer into to understand what was going wrong with it. We switched to a Toyota for just this reason — that the engine was just that … an engine — one with no software managing it. Why? Because our Chevy Cruz fell victim to its own technology.
I understand the need for failsafes, but when something has so many systems and redundancies, in such prominent places — so much that they almost overwhelm the design and functionality of the machine, that should be a red flag.
If someone sells you an electronics device and then tries to sell you an expensive insurance package afterwards, doesn’t this dent your confidence in its longevity? Perhaps we exist in a post quality product era. When I first came across the idea of built in obsolescence it was pitched to me as a way to ensure that a product would break down and force someone to go out and shop for a replacement, because previous to that things were built to last, and your sales cycle became a longer and more arduous trek. Now it seems that obsolescence is a concept that is driven purely by fashion, rather than anything being technologically wrong with something.
We are so hooked into the notion of trending subjects, and the micro-burst culture of fashion, that we try to beat the early adopters, and stay out ahead of the pack.
Is the expectation of failure in our technology part and parcel of the notion of its impermanence? Is this just a clever spin on the notion of move fast and break things, or if you halt you’ll catch fire?
Does the demand for a never-ending stream of new products mean that we end up with a slew of half-baked ideas that previously would have only been seen by beta-testers and consumer focus groups? Handmade things are almost a by-product of the industrialization of production; Zines are a counter-argument to the slickness of push-button publishing; and maybe we are entering a phase where people start to withdraw from social media in order to shore up their real world relationships — where the depth of engagement is something tangible, and not something measured in clicks and shares.
The ecosystem of the internet is ever in flux — as all dynamic systems are, so the internet of now isn’t the same as the internet of ten years ago, and it won’t be the same in another ten years either. Complex things that break all the time may be replaced by older clunkier things that work. Simplicity may be necessary if the traffic slow promised by the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality ever has the horribly negative impact people have been waiting for, as that other shoe hangs like the sword of Damocles, waiting to drop. Clunky might be all you get.
You to believe it is going to get better though. The internet has become the canals and the thoroughfares through which so much trade is ferried these days, so the notion that it makes any kind of economic sense to kill that seems spurious. Government interference in this arena merely reflect their failure to control and correct other areas of society. The internet is a thing that reflects its users, that is all — it is a mirror held up to the action of its users. And so, in a data-driven, user-shaped environment, maybe this clunkiness is purely a reflection of the clunkiness of the users — some apps, which seem simple and bare bones, with singular functionality that is designed to facilitate fast use, where seemingly shallow interaction reflects a more compressed stream of data rather than a paucity of communication, are the favored place for the younger users of the medium to operate within, and maybe the smoothness reflects their comfort with this sphere. Doesn’t this then suggest that the broken areas of the internet are those that are run and inhabited by those who did not grow up with it as a native language?
Sit a kid down with something electronic and watch them operate it like it were an extension of their own body or sense apparatus. The clunkiness we do not wish to tolerate is actually our own bad practices and failure to understand how to use the things we are using. A lot of the time my computer dies because I overclock it; I have too many tabs open; I run too many apps on my phone. It’s funny. It is.
