Martha Stewart is up my nose
Now, why was it I don’t like Martha Stewart again? Oh, yeah, it’s that sense that she’s the center of the universe. Mark Frauenfelder interviews Martha Stewart for Wired, where she trods heavily on my earbud nerves.
Stewart: I think we are insane. I used to get 120 to 140 phone calls a day. And now rarely does the phone ring — other than a few archaic friends who call me — because of the BlackBerry.
Wired: That’s nice, though. You can reply at your convenience.
Stewart: No, I think it’s awful. My daughter emails me. When your daughter starts to email you instead of talk to you… It’s horrible. You cannot forget human communication. When the Walkman first came out, I called it the Rudeman: Everybody who’s listening to those is rude to me. I think part of the reason I got divorced was because of the Rudeman.
Wired: Really?
Stewart: Oh yeah. I’d be in the garden, weeding and chatting away and no answer! [Laughs.] That was like… when was the Walkman?
Wired: The early ’80s, I guess.
Stewart: Yeah, that’s it. He had one. Boy, he got out of there fast.
I think I’ve made myself very clear on the earbuds issue — just because I’m sharing the space doesn’t mean I’m available to talk. Not even if you’re Martha “The World Must Always Pay Attention To Me” Stewart. If you’re personally offended that people would rather listen to music than chat about the weather with a stranger while riding in an elevator, it’s probably because you have an over-developed sense of self-importance. “Jim,” you say, “the horse is dead, stop beating it.” OK, I will. But the email thing…
What freaking planet does Martha Stewart live on? For thousands of years you could only communicate with another human being if you were in earshot. And then we created writing and you could write letters instead. But at first those took months to deliver, often at great risk to human life, and months to get a reply. Even when we developed the modern postal system, it still took awhile. On one hand it was hard to communicate with people. On the other, however, there were precious few people you could communicate with at any given time.
Then in the twentieth century we got phones. You could communicate with people in their own homes as long as they were in earshot of the bell. A fantastic breakthrough in distance communication! Before, you could only be interrupted at home by people who lived with and near you. Hell, even people all the way on the other side of the planet can call and chat.
So now with cell phones and free minutes, everyone you know — every business associate, friend, family member, ex-lover, telemarketer, politician, scam-artist or criminal — can call you at any time, any place, for any reason, no matter what you are doing. Human communication? You’re soaking in it!
And yet every so often some brain-dead ignorant self-regarding pseudo-luddite like Martha Stewart will come along and whine about the “loss” of “personal” “human contact” because some of us, in an effort to retain a shred of our sanity and privacy, elect to unplug from this global human network for a time and get some peace and quiet.
So Martha thinks email and headphones are rude? Boo freaking hoo. I got her rude right here.
