Technology And The Droste Effect

"An image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. This smaller version then depicts an even smaller version of itself in the same place, and so on."

-Wikipedia

I'm starting to get the feeling that technology, and especially 'social media', is experiencing its own version of the Droste effect. I'm sure this has something to do with my own "digital diet" (as soupsoup referred to it) but there's something slightly mind-numbing about using all this high technology to deliver information about itself. It would have sounded silly to have heard the promise as a child, "one day in the future we'll all carry miniature computers, and they'll all be linked up to each other, and we'll use those computers to bicker and piss and moan about our miniature computers."

I'm starting to wonder if there isn't enough actual tactile culture - either in quality or duration - that can make full use of the incredible bandwidth that can now transmit it. Isn't "using" something different than "employing" it? Look at record making in the '60s; stereo sound, once it was made easily available to mixing engineers, was absolutely exploited to foolish extents until it settled in so that the ability to use stereo didn't confuse itself with the need for it.

I get it, the stuff is neat. We know. The iPad is a cool thin slice of anodized possibility. Magical? That will be having a room full of friends with tablets out flicking their favorite songs to one another. Watching movies at the same time in sync would be magical. The iPad's greatest social media app is quite literally its application in presenting media in a physical social setting.

If you were to draw a chart showing technological capability vs social integration, there's a strong argument that could be made for the Palm V being the most balanced device ever made. Do you remember owning one? Sure, there was a ton it couldn't do, but what it could do made for a CLEAN user experience. It didn't make you tired. It made you think of less, not more.

And that's what I want; I want the technology to advance but the experience to feel clean, vital, integrated. I want my life to be the star of the show and for the technology to work backstage. I want social media, like stereo did before it, to become a little less spectacle and a little more natural.