In the Arts & Culture edition of The Minaret, Opinion Editor Rich Solomon gave a general overview of social classes based on low brow, middle brow and high brow. I realized how appropriate it would be to do the same in terms of technology. So in honor of our tech edition, that’s exactly what I’ll do.
At the very least, technology plays an important role in our daily lives. At the very most, it has become our lives. But what exactly is considered of the highest class versus that of the lowest class? And what falls in between that?
We’ll begin with cell phones. Starting with the lowest of the low, we find iPhones placed in the lowbrow category. My apologies to iPhone owners—I know there are a lot of you. And that’s kind of the problem. They are too mainstream to be classy. Hipsters would agree with me. Though iPhones are certainly the best quality of cell phone, owning one is like saying you saw Avatar. How unoriginal.
Looking down on all iPhones is the Blackberry, which I’ve decided is easily the high brow brand of phone. In order to explain this decision, let me use the people in my life who own a Blackberry as examples.
Looking down on all iPhones is the Blackberry, which I’ve decided is easily the high brow brand of phone. In order to explain this decision, let me use the people in my life who own a Blackberry as examples.
Most notably, Minaret Social Media Director Kyle Bennett, Minaret Editor-in-Chief Mike Trobiano and my father all have had Blackberries for as long as I can remember. Kyle’s phone is constantly vibrating as he receives texts, emails and all kinds of sports updates; Mike’s phone is doing the same while he complains about how many emails he gets on a daily basis; and my father is on his phone non-stop dealing with business matters. These three have not much else in common aside from the fact that there are attached to their Blackberries—they share this trait with all other Blackberry owners as well. Let me put it this way—if you own a Blackberry, your credibility automatically skyrockets. You are frequently seen walking around campus or wherever (and you appear to be in a hurry, because you have places to be), with Blackberry in hand, eyes focused on the screen while your fingers patter away at the keyboard. You look important because of your Blackberry, whether or not you actually are an important person. Now that’s a high brow piece of technology.
There’s not much to say about the middle brow phone, which is the Droid. Yawn. A Droid is something you buy so as to not conform to the Apple product, but you’re just not classy enough to have a Blackberry. Because owning a Blackberry would be gutsy, since Droids seem to be considered a “smarter” brand of smart phone. How do I come to this conclusion? I own a Droid. I used to have a Blackberry, but wanted a more technologically advanced phone (or what I thought was one) without being a sheep and owning an iPhone.
Let’s move on from phones, though. Owning an alarm clock is so far up the rung of high brow that it almost deserves its own class. As our generation seems to heavily rely on cell phones to wake us up, still using an alarm clock is nothing short of impressive. I applaud you for being in touch with a part of history. You’re vintage. Why rely on a cell phone when you can rely on a piece of technology that’s sole purpose is to wake you up? And an alarm clock never lets you down. Except that one time it caused you to miss your final exam, and let you down.
How about technology in sports? The role of instant replay has been a hot topic in the last decade or so. Instant replay takes away part of the human element to the game at the same time it eliminates (or at least that’s the idea) errors that potentially change the outcome of the game. It’s middle brow, because there’s two fairly equal sides to the argument, and both of those sides have long ago been beaten to death with a blunt object.
Then there’s fantasy football. Former NFL Head Coach Herm Edwards once said “you play to win the game.” Maybe so in reality, but not in the online world of fantasy football. Putting it best was sports talk show host Jim Rome when he said (and I’m paraphrasing) that it’s OK to participate in fantasy football, but you play to lose. And he’s kind of right. Fantasy football in general is the middle brow. It’s really neither here nor there. Winning, though, reaches a low point. You’re spending too much time on a pseudo-fictitious sport, and you’re actually good at it. I won in a fantasy football league last year. Even more pathetic is the fact that it was my league. This year I’m just kind of hanging in there, not expecting much to come out of it. Sure, I probably won’t be winning any money come season’s end, but at least that’s not lowbrow.
So there you have it; just the start of classifying technology into social classes. I hope you find that you belong more in the middle or higher brow, not sitting there unhappy while your iPhone notifies you that you’ve just been named champion of your fantasy football league.
My gCal alert just went off to come back and see how this all played out. It seems that I was right. No backwards forwards compatibility with BB. If those users had purchased a BB the day this was written, they would still be using a phone with no solid apps, whilst their flashy Z10 brethren rock the latest Android JVM ports.
That Nexus device I spoke on that specific date of is currently capable of running the latest and greatest JellyBean release, UbuntuTouch, and FirefoxOS. NFC payment is now supported by all Paypass and paywave locations. What has changed is the phone itself matters less. Cross-platform frameworks are getting better and better, even after big names like Facebook shoved them to the side.
Imagine if someone listened to you and purchased a BB on Nov 30th, ’11. They would have to suffer through the pain of OS6/7 for another six months. No flash, no solid updates, no apps, no blink browser transition and no resolution to view those flashy new images your friends are taking at 8+MP.
Dear Minaret and Readers,
PLEASE stop referring to all Android phones as Droids. In the same way that a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square. So it is with Android phones. All Droids are Android, but not all Android phones are Droids. You wouldn’t call an iPhone an iPad because it runs the same software would you? Get it strait.
Thank you,
Myself
Sorry but you’d have to be naive or a fanboy to buy a Blackberry right now. OS7 Will literally be outdated Q1 2012 when a non-compatible BBX is released [First major overhaul of BBOS in over a decade], lacking compatibility with any current BB device sans Playbook.
Ultra High brow- Nexus devices… Developer / pure phones, curved screens, and most importantly, Google Wallet. NFC is currently usable at any ‘paypass’ location to pay for things with your phone. All those membership cards are also usable on NFC, and include exclusive discounts. Yes they are ‘droids’ but you’ll never get them confused seeing a curved phone pay for things by waving it around.
This function always wows the non-tech savy, with the exact ‘image’ mentality you state about bb. The Bank of America ATM on campus actually supports NFC if you’re lucky enough to have gotten into the beta.
Sega Genesis? Droid + PS3 controller + hdmi cable = all retro consoles.
Ironically, 3d movies and Google+ integration are two selling points of some droids. It’s also ironic that Blackberry is the only one mentioned that has no Minaret app… Even though the developer account is free to students [as is the wp7 under dreamspark, which should’ve gotten a mention given the 360’s highbrow status].