Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Sterling: Poor folk love their cellphones

nytimes.com

54 pointsshalmanese36 comments

Damn and blast, where is the podcast of the Bruce Sterling SXSW talk? It doesn't appear to be up here yet:

I'm tired of all these bits-and-pieces leaks. Sterling's one-liners are much more fun -- and often make rather more sense -- in context.

I suppose, if I had been willing to spend more money, I could have just gone to SXSW and heard Sterling in person. But, instead, I have to wait like a mendicant for them to get around to dribbling it out to me. Maybe this is what Sterling was talking about.

This reads more like a comparison of "old money" and "new money" to me, than of rich and poor. I have more than one rich friend who would hate to be disconnected.

Actually, it sounds more like a restatement of the Theory of the Leisure Class:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Class

(This is a wonderful book by the way, and it was recommended to me by a Chief Marketing Officer. Reading it on his recommendation was the first time I realized he was actually quite smart.)

Of course poor people love their cell phones! But rich people too (even more sometimes)... And what's the point? How you use Twitter is a pretty different story. I find the article has a pretty strange structure anyway, I'm sort of searching the point the writer wants to make. Some more tweeting could help the author to get more concise maybe :)

The article was thought-provoking for me, as I hadn't heard the Sterling talk, but she lost me here:

I myself mostly post links to this column, hoping that the self-promotion is transparent enough that people can easily ignore a link or click it if they’re curious ....

I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into some banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince everyone that regular beatings give you character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.

And what is stopping her from doing that? Her Twitter usage seems to be very much self-promotional and one way, so it's not as if she's leaving a community she has a stake in. What's she whining about?

Bruce Sterling is awesome! He's one of the very few people who I'll at least skim pretty much anything he writes, watch all his talks, think about what he says. Sometimes he's wrong, but it's always a great ride. Love the guy.

Funnily enough I basically hate all his books but who cares.

>> in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.

> And what is stopping her from doing that?

Lack of money, perhaps? Even the non-material first part

>> among family and friends

can be difficult if everyone are busy making ends meet.

She was speaking metaphorically.

Surprised someone downmodded me for this one. If you actually read the article, she wasn't literally talking about living in an overcrowded neighborhood and wanting to move to a big, secluded house; she was talking about feeling bombarded with tweets and wanting to get out of the Twittersphere, where she's not really well accepted.

You know, writers sometimes use these things called "metaphors" to make their points more interesting ... :P

Context is everything, in this case the context is Sterling's assertion that connections is for poor people. So the context is rich versus poor. "A big, secluded house" is correctly a metaphor, but a shallow one, namely for living the style of life of rich people. Something that really is a whole lot easier if you have a lot of money.

This makes your original question seem weird, you are basically asking "What prevents her from living like a rich person?". The answer to that one is obviously "Lack of money".

The key word in Sterling's quote is 'dependence'. I can use these services without becoming dependent on them. They're useful, so is whatever I'm reading while I'm on the can.

I don't know, maybe it means more to all those motivational self-help and internet marketing types on Twitter.

One of the great advantages I see in microblogging is the ability to walk in and out of the "attention stream" at leisure. Try that with IM and you're considered rude or strange.

Of course, some probably have a harder time walking away than others.

I like the web and connectivity because I like making shit, he doesn't address the developer side of it all.

he doesn't address the developer side of it all

Well, not to put too fine a point on it: We're a vanishingly small percentage of humanity.

What we think about the web is disproportionately important, because people who build the web have a certain amount of power to control how people use it by tweaking the design. But, ultimately, we don't get to choose how the medium is used, any more than the makers of the atomic bomb got to choose how that was used... or the people who write music and books get to decide how their work will be reviewed and who will quote from it.

Bruce Sterling "Poor folk love their cellphones."

"Poor folk" don't have cellphones. They can't afford them.

There is a $20 Billion (with a B) a year market in prepaid cell phone services that says you are wrong.

And as is often the case, providing convenient retail solutions for small purchasers can be more profitable than demanding long term contracts.

As with many things, when it comes to mobile services the poor pay more and get less.

Those are lower middle class people buying those services. The poor would be choosing between their cellphones and shelter. Am not saying there are no people that choose to be homelessness and keep their cellphone, but there aren't very many.

No true Scotsman would own a cellphone!

In all seriousness, "poor" to me does not mean homeless. In fact, there are many people above the poverty line who I consider poor (the so-called "working poor".) Obviously this is different for you, and it's silly to have an argument over semantics.

There's official US. Gov't standards for these types of things, you know.

I use the same terminology and standards the US. Gov't does. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/threshld/thresh07.htm...

If someone insists on trying to communicate applying their own individual definition to terms of common usage that are different than those others in a region uses, they themselves are the ones that will have difficulty communicating their ideas.

If the discussion is about poverty and the poor, and the discussion is in the US, the US Gov't standard would be the reasonable standard for terminology to be derived.

So a single person with no dependents is considered poor in the US if they make less than $10,590 or roughly 10/11 K a year. I responded to Sterling's statement that said poor people love cellphone because people that make less than 10/11K a year don't have cell phone because they can't afford them.

If you go through tracfone.com you can get into a phone and have very minimal service for less than $100 a year. That's slightly less than 1% of gross income, which is probably low for what people in that situation spend on communication.

Now you or I would find the service cripplingly limited. But for someone who really needs it. It's there.

It is quite obvious from the article that "poor" was used there in sense of "not rich". Like, when one says "I'm a poor student" he doesn't necessarily mean he lives in cardboard box and hunts for his lunch in city park.

"I'm a poor student" he doesn't necessarily mean he lives in cardboard box and hunts for his lunch in city park.

Well if you're a sociology student or something... :P

It's not at all unusual to see homeless people with mobile phones. Some homeless shelters even provide them to clients, to help them with job hunting. And it's not like anyone is "choosing to be homeless" by spending $5/month on a prepaid cell phone.

In downtown Palo Alto you can see people sitting on the sidewalk with cardboards which say they lost their jobs and don't have money for food, talking on their iPhones.

You think there's poor people in Pala Alto, CA, huh?

Wikipedia has per capita income in Palo Alto, CA as $56,257.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_locations_by_per_cap...

Given the number of people whose income is over $56K, that implies that there are just as many, if not more, people whose income is below that.

The US standard for poverty is roughly $10,500 a year. Palo Alto's median income more than 5 times the US poverty standard.

Go find me a place IN Palo Alto someone whose income is $10,500 a year can pay what the US Fed. Gov't standard for what it considers reasonable rent... 30% of one's income to live IN Palo Alto.

My friend told me the other day he was in a bus, and there he saw a very poor immigrant who was talking on his cell whole trip. I thought this was weird and unusual, but he told me he saw similar thing lots of times. Many of my friends who earn little, spend ALL of their money on unnecessary purchases, like newest cellphones, newest clothing, etc, they're deep in debt and continue spending this way.

There's some really incredible things people say "a friend of theirs saw." Here's a regularly updated page with 25 of those things people swear their friends were eyewitness to...

http://www.snopes.com/info/top25uls.asp

Kudos for bringing it up. Now we have a conspiracy to find the elusive poor guy with a cellphone. Maybe next decade we'll develop a cryptomobilanthropology hunting for the unbelieveable miracle of elusive poor guy talking on a cell phone hiding in foggy woods and out-of-focus areas.

Kudos, Adam503, keep up the good work debunking the greatest mysteries of our time!

Ain't that the American dream?

I think you're missing the point, which is more about misery loving company than about cellphones.

Sure they do afford. Most people in Africa have a cell phone. They just don't have computers.

I don't know about "most." But yeah, the story of the poor African who uses a microloan to buy a cellphone that he/she rents to the rest of the village has been told so many times, it's a cliche.

Also there's the one about the fishers and farmers who check on market prices before making the long trek to sell their goods.

They can if they get a loan from Grameen. And lots of them have. And paid the loans off, using the phones.

Bruce Sterling seems to have confused his concepts of "Rich" and "Old" Old people dislike connections, hide in private gardens. There are plenty of "Rich" people who live to sip from the firehose that is the internet...

Nothing special - all those cheap digital illusions (TV and now its successor - Internet) were adapted especially for the poor, targeted to the poor, and massively advertised to them. It just works, and now we can see the results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com