Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "5 Debunked Tech Inventions That Changed The World" video.

  1. I'm afraid I was a skeptic of both the cell phone and the smart phone. I just couldn't understand the appeal of mobile technology, but tens of millions of people did. And back around 2006 I remember being skeptical of a very smart woman who argued that Netflix was going to make video rental stores obsolete. It seems like each time I've been wrong it was because of a failure of imagination. I couldn't imagine that people might prefer to do things differently from the way I did them, or that they would value things I dismissed as irrelevant and dislike things I valued.
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  2. Yeah. For me the main problem with a smart phone was the idea that someone would want to be constantly connected to the Internet. Back then I "surfed" the Net for a certain number of hours each day, and that was it. Being online was an activity like watching TV or reading a book. The concept of constantly being online, doing everything online and being reachable by others 24/7 just didn't sound appealing - but it has become the dominant paradigm, for good and ill.
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  3. I know what you mean. It adds another layer of virtuality to the world to have buttons you can see but not feel. They say it's extremely distracting to use touch screens in cars, because they require a greater level of focus than old fashioned buttons and sliders and switches.
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