I have been wanting to write about this for a while.
Recently we found ourselves in the Singapore Zoo and started marveling at the more obvious changes. The one thing I primarily noticed is the high cost of everything and what could be possibly perceived as rampant commercialisation or more meanly, nickel-and-diming.
The zoo ticket costs a certain amount, which is already priced pretty highly.
Next to the ticket counter are a bunch of restaurants with mildly overpriced food - though admittedly good-looking, temptingly tasty, overpriced food, which conceivably tourists and locals who are in a touristy mood may want to go eat for the "holiday" experience.
There are souvenir shops all over, a kind of Disneyland experience where you can spend more money buying plushies or other kitschy remembrances of your trip there. Also concession stands and snack outlets and so on placed at cunningly strategic locations (while waiting for a show to start in the amphitheatre, fer example) where you can load up on cool drinks to relieve the heat, popcorn, and other crunchy things. For a price, of course.
Furthermore, if you happen to have kids who don't want to walk - or if you yourself don't want to walk the full length of the zoo, you have options. There is the tram ride. For $5, you can have unlimited tram rides. Rent a baby stroller? $9.
You can also pay $15 for a "Tiny Xplorer" buggy/pushcart thingmajig in which your little ones sit and you get to haul them around pulling on a big handle like a horse hitched to a cart. (I know, I stared at the poster for a while wondering which parents would be foolish enough to pay money for the privilege of dragging their kids around instead of making them walk. I guess it beats carrying them as deadweight in your arms.)
If you're not attracted by the manual options, because they involve actual physical work, well, you can throw money at the problem to get it to go away. Choose the nice motorised scooter option at $25 or $35 (depending on the size, I assume.)
Wheelchairs are free. See how nice we are? Of course, Singaporean grandpeople being what they are, few of them would be caught dead (or alive) in a wheelchair, since the disability stigma is so strongly inculcated into their small brains. They would much rather go for the motorised scooter, thank you.
Speaking of other rides, there are elephants and pony carts and carousels and things! All for the price of a ticket, f'course. Disneyland style. Pay to enter the park. Queue up in a million lines to pay for a ride ticket. Queue up again to go for the ride. Rinse and repeat.
And when you're tired and want to unleash the kids on the playground, there is a nice KFC and Ben and Jerrys nearby and so on.
Wow.
The other thing I'm struggling with is a serious deadly attraction to the iWhatevers. It's been 3-4+ years of staunch resistance and holding out, but goddamn Apple is everywhere.
Something in their design has a terrible gravitic allure, similar to fads like World of Warcraft or Tamagotchi or Bubble Tea. The smoothness of the shiny touchscreen. The seeming ease by which you see other people navigate their iPhones. The tempting (if expensive) connectivity of a 3G Internet connection coupled with a display screen that does it justice.
And the millions of apps, which are in essence a whole bunch of iWhatever toys in a virtual store that can be bought... and then crisis of all crises, shown off to other people. Creating emotions such as envy and lust and pure geek "it must be mine"ness a la Igor from Dork Tower.
I had one of these close encounters the other day. A work colleague and I were waiting for our respective rides. In the interests of maintaining social interaction, small talk ensued. (Mostly they talked and I murmured appropriate expressions of feigned interest with some polite questions interspersed to encourage them to continue.)
Somehow the conversation boiled down to the colleague's iPhone. Which, they were naturally playing with, in the manner of all iWhatever junkies out there. Just as naturally, they started flipping through their millions of apps to proudly show off in a mainstream impressed fashion what newfangled wonder the shiny rectacular cuboid was capable of.
And that particular app was indeed pretty goshdarned cool in a pretty goshdarned "I wish it weren't so" fashion. It was a night sky thing. Using GPS, it pinpointed your location and displayed what the night sky would look like. As you rotated the iPhone, it picked up however it was tilted and moved the stars around to match.
At the time, it just seemed pretty darn impressive, though logically thinking about it, the amount of utility you'd get out of it is dubious - Singapore's sky being as overcast and light polluted as it is, and how often do you wonder where the constellations are anyway. (Now our org using it for education is another matter, of course.)
Caveat: this was a work colleague I liked, so I was in a pretty receptive mood. If it were someone obnoxious, no doubt the same behavior would have been perceived significantly differently.
And then the colleague mentioned in passing something that gave me pause, even if they didn't quite realise it. "Pretty cute, huh? I thought it was quite fun. Anyway, it didn't cost very much in the store, so what the heck." was the general sentiment, even if I didn't quite paraphrase that correctly.
A tiny little red blinking light went on in my head and went, hey look, MORE microtransactions.
This digital store thing is everywhere now. The PS3 in my house has a PS3 store. No doubt Microsoft Xbox360 has their own. Second Life does it. RPGnow/DriveThruRPG (and its spinoff variants of comics, books and wargames). Steam. Amazon. LOTRO. DDO. GW. More MMO acronyms. And of course, the Apple Store.
Even Singapore has a spin off on this model on our roads. ERP. Beep, goes the gantries. Beep, go the parking lot entries and exits.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it's altogether bad. That would make me not a Luddite, but a freaking hypocrite, since I am pretty much a Steam and Amazon sellout. (And I throw hissy fits when Amazon says they cannot deliver digital content to me because of my geographical location.)
I'm just...rather amazed when I sit back and take it all in. Consumer habits are changing. No longer do you need to go to a brick-and-mortar retail location, browse among real physical shelves and choose your product, and pull out physical cash or a physical card representing digital (but real) money and take it home with you.
Now the store is with you as and when you need or want to browse through an entire catalog, choosing your product. And all it takes is the card number to transfer digital (but real) money to someone else, and make the product "yours" to utilize.
And alas, the bloody iPad is still quite shiny.
Despite all the supposed contenders that have just raced onto the market. *waffles around with great uncertainty*
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