TOW #19: "Happiness Is a Warm iPhone" by Charles Yu

"Her", the new Spike Jonze film about a man who falls in love with an operating
system, has prompted many people to reconsider their relationship technology.

Quirky filmmaker Spike Jonze recently released "Her", a movie about a man in the future falling in love with a 'female' operating system. "Her" has been critically acclaimed and is one of the most popular films currently in theaters. People interested in technology have commented on whether, as it advances, human-computer relationships could become common, and one of those people is Charles Yu, writing for The New York Times. In "Happiness is a Warm iPhone" Yu writes about how his once-ardent love of new technology has faded in recent years. He uses his own personal experiences, likens a love of technology with a romantic relationship, and describes current technological trends to argue to they are too similar to the real world and no longer "challenge" people. This results in a piece that may make a reader question their own relationship with technology.

Yu is in this thirties, so he was a child when computers became popular. He explains, "My first real crush was on my family's Commodore 64." Yu says that after giving up one making computer programs he 'fell out of love' with the Commodore 64. However, he continues, "It was my first experience with what I could call a possibility space... in theory, anything could happen." Later in the piece, Yu says that he also became infatuated with email and his first iPhone. However, he says, "... as in too many real relationships, I woke up one morning and found that, for all my affection for and dependence on that phone, I was no longer in love with it." By comparing losing love for a phone to losing love for a person, Yu shows that both changes are caused by the same thing: boredom due to familiarity. This helps him prove that we become dependent, and therefore too used to, technology, so we no longer see how wonderful it is and how much potential it has.
Although personal stories can help establish a writer's ethos, readers cannot always relate to the writer's experiences. Therefore, it was a good decision on Yu's part to generally describe what technology is currently like, which is something that readers can understand and relate to. Yu writes, "Our gadgets are engineered to fit just right, into your hands, our lives. Virtual environments, apps and sites are designed by experts with care, forethought..." It stands to reason that when things are made to be perfect and are made to be an outright improvement in one's life, its marvels are not recognized and it is thought of as just another part of life. Yu appeals to this logic to support his argument that technology is too familiar to be loved and appreciated. 
Charles Yu claims that technology is so integrated into our lives that it becomes just another uninteresting part of our landscape. Those who do not agree with him may argue that it is too advanced and too impressive to ever be thought of in such a way. However, as Yu says, "We're holding magic boxes, boxes that want to serve us and coddle us, instead of challenge us. And how can you love something that doesn't challenge you?"




























Article link: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/happiness-is-a-warm-iphone.html?ref=opinion