Keeping up with the ipjones: buying an Iphone

I am recovering with a glass of Irish whiskey after a day of technological terror. It's the fault of a phone.

No doubt subliminally inspired by the weekend’s lamentable isnackery (I can’t believe it’s not beta butter), today I rushed out and bought an iphone. It’s a luxury item that will cost me at least $1,300 or thereabouts to Telstra over two years. But I’d been meaning to buy one for some time so I felt the rushing was justified. It was going to give me more communications options which would become a useful part of my outdoor armoury. (pic is either my new phone or that mysterious stone from 2001: A Space Odyssey)

The purchase and its aftermath were stressful events, if neither unexpected. I found the whole commercial experience of choosing and then buying a phone very difficult.

Part of me hates change because it means I have to unlearn old ways of doing things. Not being part of the igeneration, I was quite happy to hold on to the old phone even though it was well out of contract. But inertia was eventually overcome by the idea of communicating on the run. The ability to send text and pictures to the Internet in near real-time was immensely appealing.

This was my second attempt to buy an iphone. Last time I went to my local Telstra shop they told me there was a four week delay so I didn't bother. I would have had it by now. But today there was no waiting period. Choice was limited - I wanted a sedate black-backed phone but there were none in that colour. Impatient to wait, I chose a more attention-grabbing white cover.

Technical spec was not as much a big deal for me. Knowing about Moore’s Law and resource-hungry apps I should have gone for the 32 meg disk phone instead of the 16. But that was going to cost $200 more and I didn’t think it was worth it. I will repent my stinginess at leisure. I paid an extra $10 a month for 150 meg of monthly download time. Time will tell if that amount is too big, sufficient, or too small. I forgot to ask how many megapixels the camera is but found out later its 2 MP.

When I took the phone home I panicked as I could find see my contacts list of telephone numbers anywhere. I shuddered what that would mean if it was gone. I rang the shop who patiently assured me they had copied them across to the new SIM but I would have to import the damn things.

It took me a while to find out how. Neither the “Finger Tips” document nor the Iphone 3GS “Important Product Information Guide” were much use as a user manual (and the text in the latter “important” document was so small, it could have been borrowed from the Rosetta Stone). But with much trial, error, and liberal Saxon slang I found the import screen on the phone. My contact list was back, to great relief.

If that all went ok in the end, the same cannot be said for iTunes set-up. The first thing I wanted to do was download the free Twitter and Facebook apps. In order to do that I needed an iTunes account which I did not have already. I went through the longwinded account set-up (including spending forever to decide on my “secret question” - but I'd have to kill you if I told you what that was). Apple asked me for a credit card number which they nicely said they would keep for later transactions. I baulked at this option - I was only there for a free app.

But even still it was a slow process. Accompanied by several loud oaths, my tedious attempts at club-footed typing was struggling on a small and unfamiliar keyboard. Several times I misspelt the userid or password or had to go off to another screen to find the underscore (in my mail address) or the at-sign. Whenever I made an error, which was common, I’d try and correct but often would accidentally send myself to some other screen and I’d have to start from scratch again. In short it took me a while to find the "return" key.

Eventually I created my account and quickly found an email in my inbox. I tried clicking on this link from the phone itself but it insisted the link must come from a computer. When I did try on the laptop, the verification email took me to this screen (shown right) which told me I was “just a few steps away” from downloading music, HD TV shows, movies, and more from the iTunes Store.

Just a few steps away? But all I was doing was verifying. Why was this so complex? It didn’t look like a verification screen to me and there was nothing there that said I was verified or needed to do something else. I tried to re-download the Twitter app but no surprise, it was still telling me my account was unverified.

After several repeat attempts (complete with more spelling mistakes and misturns) I decided maybe nothing was happening because I didn’t have iTunes installed.

But when I tried to install it, the windows installer crashed. This was the signal the Gods were against me today I eventually gave up none the wiser as to how to download free apps. I can possibly blame the devil's own defective code of my Vista operating system for the installer problem. But Apple’s own support procedures are poor too. The material sent out with the iphone is abysmal and there is no contact information on the “do not reply” verification email.

I had cursed KafkApple enough and was still anxious to try out Twitter on the phone. I logged onto my twitter homepage via the phone’s Safari brower and typed in a test message. But my fingers were taking some time to get used to the smaller keyboard. So the initial tweet read “testing from ipjone”. Happy that something worked first time, I barely noticed the typo. But others did. Stilgherrian was quickest to respond: “Your ‘ipjone’ seems to be working perfectly,” he reassured me.

If only he knew. Call me Ipjonah. Here's hoping this technophobe fares better in the morning.

Media and the Culture of Fear

The world is a scary place, apparently. In the last 24 hours, media across the world hammered this home with a litany of fearful events. Across Australia, there were many matters to worry about. Over in Perth people were fretting over casino security guards with batons. The Melbourne Age found fear in pockets (and you had to read well down the article to find out the scary things were isolated areas not holes in your pants). The Sydney Daily Telegraph had their cake and ate it by inventing fears of water restrictions it could then squash. Here in Queensland the Brisbane Courier-Mail had two fears for the price of one when it freaked out about dengue fever's possible impact on Australia's "already troubled tourism industry".

Fear was also in abundance across the Pacific. The New York Times prefaced its story of a genuine Sri Lankan tragedy by saying “fears rise” over what comes next. That hotbed of intrigue, Washington DC, had double worries of social network viruses and presidential scare tactics. Up the road, The Philadelphia Bulletin wrote about fear of military attack (though not from Washington). Meanwhile The LA Times reminded us of FDR’s “fear itself” when it wrote “our reactions to fear can put us in peril.”

Across the world the misuse of fear was much the same. The Indian opposition BJP party is scared of a war with Pakistan (but only because it might hurt their election chances). Northern Irish postal workers are worried about a denial the Royal Mail will axe 16,000 jobs. Al Jazeera ascribes fear to a whole country when it says the United States is worried by Iranian satellites (a bit of metonymy that might be lost on the 99.99 per cent of Americans oblivious to events in Tehran). And pity poor Kenyans "with grey hair” who could become the next victim of witchcraft killers.

These fear stories all have one thing in common: they drag eyeballs to media and hopefully onto advertisers. But should fear be used in this way? Valid fears have their place; they are basic survival mechanisms that cue us to danger. For instance, fear of snakes and spiders was shaped by evolution and stretches back to a time when early mammals had to survive in an environment dominated by reptiles. Certain stimuli are pre-wired in the brain because they have been perennially dangerous to our ancestors.

But false fears only cause hardship. Frenzied public panics usually cause far more damage than whatever fear the panic is reacting to. Panics about crime cause untold amounts of money to be wasted on police investigations, show trials, and unnecessary incarceration. Fears of terrorism led to a war in Iraq that now costs the US $50billion in reconstruction of which $6 billion goes to private security firms. Meanwhile, the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) calculates the cost of drug abuse at $100 billion but doesn’t offer an opinion on how much of that is wasted on dragging minor users through the criminal justice system.

NIDA’s own research says that there are at least 14.8 million Americans age 12 or older who used marijuana at least once a month in 2006. Both NIDA and Michael Phelps know well that appearing soft on drugs is not an option in today’s closely watched society. Despite the fact that even anti-drug campaigners admit that death from smoking cannabis is almost unknown, the chances of it being legalised anytime soon in most jurisdictions is slim due to the fear factor.

Psychologists call this phenomenon the availability heuristic. People make judgements based on what they can remember, rather than complete data. So whenever there is a drug death story, it increases fears about all drugs. Because we remember recent experiences or reports, the news has a significant effect on our decisions.

As Barry Glassner, observes in his book The Culture of Fear, we are primed by the news which increases the accessibility of this information. When Harvard Professors Robert Blendon and John Young did a meta-survey of drug abuse surveys between 1978 and 1997, they found eight out ten people said drug abuse has never caused problems in their family yet most were still scared of the consequences. What Blendon and Young discovered was that Americans predominately got their fears from the media not from personal experience. Television was the worst offender.

This is hardly surprising. TV news lives on a diet of fear. If it bleeds, it leads. Drugs, crime and disaster all make good copy – especially if the accompanying vision is compelling. Current Affairs programs lure their audiences in with lurid claims: “A show no parent can afford to miss”, “tune in or you will be the next victim”, “every mother’s nightmare.” And it doesn’t matter how unlikely the problem, current affairs can present distraught sufferers that trump the small risk by saying “whatever the statistics, it is devastating to the victims”. There but for the grace of God go I, we think - and fears are thus heightened. As the master of fear Alfred Hitchcock once observed, “there is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it”.