The hoopla over Apple’s iPhone appears to reaffirm Steve Jobs’s famed ability to generate a reality distortion field. The virtual demo at the Apple site certainly looks slick. However, two questions come to mind, one reasonable, the other curmudgeonly. First, how are blind people or people with impaired vision expected to interact with this “advance” on the old-fashioned button-centric phone? Perhaps they’re not part of Apple’s demographic.The second question, prompted by the band showcased in the Apple demo, is whether the world needs yet another vector for the distribution of U2’s music?

As someone who sees himself as part of the “reality-based community“, I would argue that the iPhone is merely the latest tool designed to fill up every available sentiment moment with the consumption of media “content.” After all, why get involved in the nasty, solitary business of confronting the reality of one’s all-too transient existence–a mere teardrop in the ocean of time–when you can have fresh tracks from the Arctic Monkeys pipped directly into your cerebral cortex!

I’m sounding like an old fart, aren’t I?