TIDBITS FROM 6 CHAPTERS

THE CELL-PHONE
Although the key-pad is an integral part of the design of the phone, by happenstance it also fits how we have always tried to get someone's attention. Before we can reach out and touch someone, our fingers have to touch a bunch of buttons. By necessity we have to use our fingers to nudge and prod to attention the voice we want to hear. We can't get attention until we've used our hands. To use one's fingers to get someone to notice us, to talk to, is as old as the hills. From toddlerhood onward we tug on clothes, touch a hand, grab an arm to signal our need or willingness to talk. And often it's done even though the tugger has nothing much to say nor expects even a single pearl of wisdom. It is not the possibility that the connection might sparkle with brilliant discourse that sells a lot of cells! It is that we can establish on impulse that we matter to someone, be it ever so briefly.

HAIR
In ages when we did not yet know how to modify our environment to be warm in winter or cool in the summer, hair conferred protection from freezing to death or having one's skin roasted. The taming of fire, using caves as shelter, building primitive huts and keeping a source of heat going took almost 300,000 years. Over that time body hair became less and less necessary to keep the DNA container alive long enough to produce a version of itself. Speaking of those replicas: every baby replica found the nourishing nipple beneath some hair, be it the fur or hair of the mom unit or her chest-covering furry garb. That primal memory alone should suffice to make us want to touch, stroke, nuzzle hair.

PRINT IS TOAST
For our essentially still stone-age physiology, it's not a good fit to get information in print mode. It's easy to look and talk; it's hard to learn to read and write. We're evolved to function in a collection of people who share a relatively small space, mostly stay put, know each other by name, are kin to half the folk in the tribe, are guided by the same beliefs, do some tilling, gathering, hunting. This was, by and large, village life as well. In that setting one's brain was not asked to train the eye along lines made up of variously shaped marks; instead information got picked from a bunch of visual clues. Now it so happens that our latest brainchild, the globe-conquering digital processor, scatters over our information-rich landscape congenial visual clues: icons here; icons there; icons simply everywhere.