:: More Phoney Ideas ::
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3498714.stm
Coming soon after a week when David Hockney expressed despairing frustration about the erosion of photographic truth in a post-Photoshop age, this "invention" is a further foray into our digitally uncertain futures. This mobile phone product enables callers to insert false background noises to reproduce the desired milieu, perhaps a doctor's surgery waiting room, or a traffic jam. Supposedly, though I have not heard them, the false noises are authentic sounding: like the “real” thing.
Ironically, digital electronics was invented in order to gain precision, accuracy and authenticity. However, as Neil Postman commented in Technopoly, technologies have their own idea about the future. The power to correct digital mistakes lends itself to the ability to manipulate. Whereas we originally wanted to ensure that a “1” was indeed a “1” and a “0” was indeed a “0”, the corrective nature of being digital also allows for the “1” to become the “0” and vice versa, should we simply chose it to be so. Hence, the zeros of guilty silence in the philanderer’s motel bedroom become a frenzy of ones somewhere on the M4.
Little did the bedroom trickster know that his or her phone was reporting its real location to the technically alert spouse! Divorce was pronounced via text message, or an appropriately crafted photo message of two fingers, or something like that: most likely real ones, much to Hockney's delight.
11:41:25 PM 
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