Here’s a funny thing. A few years ago, in a piece for Ovum
about the long-term future of telecoms and all that, I segmented the consumer
market into three categories: Digital Citizens, the mainstream consumers of
media content and applications; Digital Metics, those largely excluded from the
digital world by reason of poverty, transience, lack of skills, or even choice;
and Digital Outlaws, who rejected the mainstream world for a DIY ethic and an
interest in encryption, open source, free content, and so on.
I thought of myself as belonging in the latter category,
even though I’m not that much of a hacker. I used Linux (Ubuntu) on my personal
laptop. I used a G-Box for my smart TV. I got my content through BitTorrent
kind of on principle. I even used an alternative version of Android on my
Samsung smartphone.
In the space of about a week I’ve ended up turning my back
on almost all that. My new laptop, an Asus X550C, won’t play nicely with Ubuntu
(it won’t recognise the wireless connection, or even install properly). We despaired
of the G-Box, which needed to be rebooted almost every time we used it, and
made it fiendishly difficult to add a new channel ever, and we bought a
Chromecast instead, which has turned out to be rather brilliant and really
simple to use. Ruth got herself a Netflix subscription. And I got a new Samsung
phone, and I can’t face going through the tortuous process of installing
Cyanogenmod on it when it’s working quite well at the moment and I can’t think
what the actual benefits would be.
Right now I don’t think this is a permanent change of
mindset, but perhaps the mindset will follow where the behaviour has led. I’ll
keep an eye on it.
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