Originally published July 26 2005
Columnist fears technology boom is causing antisocial behavior
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Between iPods, satellite television, the internet and a host of other sources, there are plenty of technological ways for the average person to enjoy themselves, but The Times columnist Ed Smith thinks these products are very lonely, and most people would be better served to spend some time with friends, family and their own imagination.
F LEISURE TIME IS ALWAYS getting better, why the nostalgia?
It is the age of iPod, and yet we romanticise vinyl.
Two new books are concerned with modernity and social change, the way we pursue life and the stuff that surrounds us, the "I" generation.
Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita, is a dazzling array of provocative social theories pinned around the idea that the media now permeates every strand of our experience.
In this postmodern mediated world, our emotions have been so manipulated from such an early age that we cannot imagine it any other way.
De Zengotita answers his questions with a chatty, restless and energetic brilliance that suggests that he can't stop writing in case he loses the train of thought.
Where Thomas de Zengotita's book is about everything, the world in one volume, Dylan Jones focuses on one man and one gadget.
Jones is a sharp observer of the social scene and an original music critic --- particularly when he writes about his heroes Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen.
There are also cameo appearances from Paul Smith and Yoko Ono, though Jones himself is often at the heart of the action.
But Jones does switch off the self-analysis when he tells the story of Apple and iPod.
That strand of the book --- how Steve Jobs founded Apple in his parents' garage and how selling six million iPods made Apple �ber-cool again --- reads more like a long New Yorker essay than a pop culture autobiography.
The iPod is only one extremely successful example of the more general privatisation of leisure time.
Private time has been the winner, social life the loser.
Conversation might broaden the mind, Gibbon argued, but solitude is the school of genius.
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