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from Apple.com

The 8 or the 16?

That’s the question rolling in my noggin about for the past 48 hours or so since I received an iPod touch as a gift (and, in the words of Wayne & Garth, “Schwing!”).

So … how much memory should one get? The best answer is “as much  as you can.” But, as I pondered it, I also recalled something that Neil Postman said.

Now, I realize I quote Postman a lot. I don’t know why. Maybe I think it makes me sound smart. I’ll ask my therapist.

In an essay entitled, “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change,” Postman writes:

that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life.

As I was pondering the memory issue, I was also thinking about the inherent bias, or prejudice, embedded in the iPod touch.

The thing about the 8 GB vs. 16 GB touch seems to be the illusion of freedom. We can take it all with us. We store our music, pictures, videos (all of our “memories”) on these things. But what we find out is that these things rarely have enough memory. And so the device we have to free us from our computers actually ties us closer to them.

Now, we have to plan what to put on the device and what to leave off. We have to create lists of music (not the whole collection) and pictures (just the recent ones) and videos (not too many … maybe switch to renting). As we do this, we spend more time on our computer. This is why the bulk storage/hard-drive market has expanded.As our life gets more and more digital, we have to find more and more things to store it with. And the more we store, the more we rely on these machines that are there to free us. (Geez, that sounds like Neo, huh?)

We rely more on our digital memory than our in-head analog one.

The iPod touch makes us more reliant on our “time-saving” devices. And what do we do with all that extra time? We spend it on our machines “controlling” the time savers. That’s the big idea.

By the way, I went with the 16 GB … of course.