This weekend, Time.com named its list of The 50 Worst Inventions (in no particular order). Some seem quite inspired: subprime mortgages, hair in a can, asbestos, and Snuggies for dogs, to name a few.
Others fall right into the realm of what we discuss in class and might be more questionable: Farmville (see Dekyi's post below), Foursquare, pop-up ads, and spam email.
What may first seem like some kind of power struggle between old and new media becomes comical when readers click through the compiled list to read the authors' commentaries. For Farmville:
"Blast you, Farmville. The most addictive of Facebook games is hardly even a game — it's more a series of mindless chores on a digital farm, requiring the endless clicking of a mouse to plant and harvest crops. And yet Zynga, the evil genius behind this bizarre digital addiction, says more than 10% of Americans have logged in to create online homesteads. How many hours of lost productivity does that translate to? Tough to guess. But for me, personally, at least dozens. Sorry, TIME."Foursquare is touted as being another "creepy" way to tap into "a generation of narcissism." I won't necessarily argue with that. Given the reports circulating about Foursquare users who have gotten robbed after telling the world that they are not at home, it does seem that, at times, we're demonstrating a loss in the ability to distinguish convenient connections from unnecessary overshares. Mashable.com's audience, when polled (and at this post's publication time), were almost split on the functionality of Foursquare, with 1,637 voters to 1,455 saying that Foursquare was actually useful.
And in an ironic twist, I had to "skip" a pop-up ad just to read the post on pop-up ads, which calls escaping online ads a "hopeless endeavor". Time.com may not want to bite the hand that feeds it. But, ok, agreed on spam email. Worst invention ever.
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