This Talking Is Only Bravado: In a Lifehacker poll from March 2011, nearly a third of respondents... »
In a Lifehacker poll from March 2011, nearly a third of respondents said they owned at least five computers, an especially astounding figure if you consider that smartphones didn’t count in the poll. Only 8 percent of respondents owned just one computer. To be fair, Lifehacker readers aren’t your average American—it’s a site dedicated to improving your life through technology, and its fans are probably more internet-savvy and inclined toward gadgets than most. Nevertheless, the typical American consumer isn’t wholly different. In 2009, more than a quarter of all American households had three televisions, and nearly 10 percent had five or more.
This is of course a good piece, but the subtext of the selection above is that the tech press and tech-y sites are always going to have a selection bias for minimizing the social, political, and human costs of technology. This phenomenon drives me nuts because — while influential tech evangelists like Gruber may be at the forefront of tech-murder-colonialism apology — there is a halo effect for the entire media industry that proscribes the breathless acceptance of more and more gadgets in our lives.