A necessary evil of our digital content-distributing world is the much discussed Digital Rights Management that attempt to keep the content creators as happy as the content consumers. A tough balance to be sure, it’s often frustrating to both parties and while several content distributors continue to make embarrassing attempts at fair DRM, very few have gotten it right. With so many upsides and an equal number of negatives, it’s hard to be for or against DRM, the safe bet seems to evaluate it on a case by case basis. Here’s a downside though that surprised me but makes complete sense.

“Often forgotten are factors such as equalization, file size, file format, and yes, DRM all of which can decrease battery life. If a circuit is active, it’s using power. If the processing is more complex, as it would be in the case of DRM, the circuit uses more power. So how much power is lost to DRM? link

So along with many other horror stories DRM brings us, now we have millions of computers and portable music players using more power and in the end soaking up more natural resources, all to ensure they get their cut.

Next time someone accuses you of “acquiring” a few songs, tell ‘em you did it for rainforest.

Don’t look now but you have a new incoming Instant Message. There’s 24 new emails in your inbox. 5 voicemails on your office phone. 3 new meetings placed on your office calendar, 2 voicemails and one new text message on your cell phone. And it’s only 8:55am. Do you ever feel too connected?

Our buddy Samuel Morse kicked things off back in 1835 and things haven’t slowed down since. Every day technology pushes us closer together. Sure, you can try and fight it. Or you can simply try and avoid it by being ignorant or indifferent to it. But sooner or later, you will plug in. I remember about 5 years ago my father refused to get a cell phone. It was for show offs and people who thought they were so important that the world couldn’t wait for them to get home and use a regular telephone to hear what they had to say. Besides he’d lived for 50+ years with out one, what good could it possibly due him now. Well, convenience and practicality eventually took hold and the idea of being able to be reached for family emergencies or not standing in the rain at a pay phone on the side of the road drowned out the skepticism of that little electronic devil. For 3 years running like a pair of socks, his outfit is not complete with out strapping a phone to his belt.

In 1996 a little Israeli company called Mirablis thought they might be on to something when they developed a software that would allow two people to send text directly to one another over the Internet in real time, ICQ. “I seek you” was acquired by AOL a few years later and the rest is history. An entirely new genre of communication had been born and though it was initially only used by geeks and freaks it has slowly grown into what has to be today’s 3rd most popular electronic communication after email and the phone. It’s simple, it’s versatile and now it’s in living color. Examine your social caste and you’ll see how IM best fits in your life. Teenage girl: Typing faster than any male could ever hope to, you’ll have 23 simultaneous IM conversations with the word "totally" gracing no less than 20 of those windows. Oh, and Jimmy really did say that during study hall today. 20 something computer geek:You share mainly illegally acquired software via slightly buggy direct file transfer while discussing the latest Strong Bad email and plugging away into the early morning at your most recent "hack" project, concurrent IMs=4 (remember you’ve been IMing since before the Internet existed, you have no need to impress common folk with more conversations than that). 38 year old business man: It’s practically required at your company. You transfer Excel spreadsheets, Excel workbooks, Excel formulas, and bitch chat to coworkers that Excel just crashed again. The reality that you’re sucking precious bandwidth on the company network by bouncing electrons thousands of miles to return 8 feet down the hall to your co-workers screen is muted by the importance of sharing such daily gems such as this. Concurrent IMs=however many required to keep you entertained during boring conference calls.

It’s this last user demographic that is most concerning. Today’s average business individual is, on a daily biases bombarded with an amount of information and communication that was completely inconceivable a decade ago. At any given point during a normal work day this person is managing a dozen different communication technologies in an attempt to become more efficient at their given task. Each person then becomes a hub in the information stream. Sometimes you’re the generator, sometimes the requester, sometimes just a relay. Either way you become an essential member of a complex nervous system.

So like processor fab technology things have evolved rapidly. We’ve shrunk the size of our world, reduced the time it takes to give and receive information, all in the name of greater performance. But is it working? Are we being more efficient? Are people adapting at the same rate that these innovations invade our lives?

Again I ask the question, does the technology improve the world we live in? The social implications are fascinating. I’ve been witness to entire romantic relationships initiated, maintained, and dissolved over IM, concluding with the ceremonial removal from the buddy list. What ever happened to human contact? Are we literally loosing touch? Every day as the world seems to shrink with increased access to information do we also push each other away and in the end become more desolate, an island of data with only a 750Kbps upstream connection to our loved ones? An entire generation is now being raised with new ways to stereotype each other because of who they are and new emotional senses completely foreign to their parents. Get into a fight and want to avoid someone? No problem, just block em with your IM client. Easy. Does anyone else fear that we’re not far off from having "romantic" encounters like the one between Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock in Demolition Man?

Think about it the next time you add someone to your buddy list. You’re officially declaring they are worthy of being "with" you. Is this really the kind of impersonal “relationship” you want with this person? Or is this technology providing you a connection to someone you would otherwise never “see”? And it is with a heavy heart and a well contemplated decision that you should delete your next buddy, because in your world, they will no longer exist.

They say if we live to 75 we will have spent about 25 years asleep. Sounds like a foolish waste of time to me. For my generation, I think the accumulated time watching progress bars will surpass our time asleep. They’re never fast enough are they? Moore has been proven right, yet our computers are never fast enough.

New Sony commercial on TV…”Can a better computer improve your life? Yes, it can.” Propaganda is an evil thing.

Opening the dh dictionary we find the definition for ‘consumerizing technology’: the point at which a given technology is released to the inept masses. A little over two decades ago a toaster was the most complex piece of technology in the common household. It was simple. It had a few resistors, several springs, and very rarely broke. Now, my mothers microwave radiates food to the right temperature with the aid of a touch pad of two dozen buttons, a cpu, an lcd display, and a few thousand transistors. So what’s the problem you ask? With the increase in complexity of a system, immediately follows an increased rate of miscommunication and component failure. Try selling that line to the 40 year old person who just dropped 2 grand on a new computer that was DOA.”But my SE has run for 15 years with out any problems!”

I suppose capitalism is ultimately responsible for pushing the latest technology into mass markets of people who simply don’t understand how truly complex they are. The technology is supposed to be transparent say some. Hide the computer in the pretty box, the user will never have to know what’s inside. Well, that part has worked, most people are lucky if they can even find the box. The quest of protecting the user from the technology is an admirable one. One that I believe in, to a point. It takes a high level of technological refinement to achieve that lofty goal. It must be tested and proved durable before released, and I still believe an amount of education is the best way to give the user a satisfying experience. While some products usually come close, the personal computer is unfortuneatly decades from that point. Digital camera GUIs are a joke. MP3 player navigation has managed to bewilder even me, save one. The computer in my car tells me when she’s sick, but without the help of another computer and a key to the error codes she’s parked. And my Mother has barely scratched the surface of everything her auto detergent suspensing clothes washer can do.

What am I talking about here? Job security for the lucky few. Yes, I’m a proud card carrying member of the service industry racquet. So is the guy at the Chevy deal who took 450 of my dollars to replace an O2 sensor in my car this week. An experience my grandfather never had with his ‘48 Ford. You see, he grew up with that new technology and learned how to fix it as he went along, acting as his own mechanic. Yet by the time his children started driving the technology was hidden, inaccessible to the average person…they needed a mechanic. Someone with training who would be paid well for their knowledge and skill. They took the car in when ’something was broken’ and when they got it back, it just worked, with little or no understanding of what was done to fix it. I’m a mechanic. I fix the ’something’ when it’s broken and try and hide it from everyone else.

This is a plasma display in a hallway at a local mall that shows ads for near by stores. It’s had a Windows fault-error now for 4 days. Sometimes you just can’t hide it.