My Pod

I have been having lots of problems with my iPod. I admit, I am not easy on my electronic equipment (my Vaio can attest to this). My Nokia phone has been wigging out on me for a few months now, but it was free. When I spend several hundred dollars on a piece of equipment that I could have easily lived without, the thing had better live through being dropped on the ground once or twice. The iPod hasn't even been fed peanut butter or flushed down the toilet for crying out loud!

So in the past week I have been forced to accept no less than 3 iTunes updates on laptop which is quite annoying and utterly time consuming. And of course I have to remember to deselect all the little checkboxes that say "do you want iTunes to automatically come on and prompt you to use iTunes as your default e-mail text editor every time you open your internet browser and also install no less than 200 shortcuts on your desktop as well as check for updates 2.8 times per minute" as well as 187 other little checkboxes that all ultimately mean "how can we prod you to let us further take over your life other than making you update your software every 2.4 days?".

Since then I have had several problems it iTunes as well as iPod software. I'm telling you, before I had my iPod, I had no desire to own one. I was getting by quite fine without it. Now that I've had it for a year or so, I don't know how I lived without it. But I'm starting to feel like it's time I learn. As Neil Postman said in Technopoly, technology creates new paradigms. Society with the gun isn't the same as society without the gun with a simple addition of the gun. The gun permanently alters society so that it is incomparable to what it looked like before.

I am this close to becoming a luddite. Do you think they would accept me living among them with my treadmill? (and TiVo, and by extension television and cable box)?