Necessity's abandoned
techno child

Remember the old James Bond movies? Just after the credits, Bond's boss M would briskly outline the latest threat to world peace and tranquility. Then 007 proceeded down the hall to Her Majesty's armorer, Q. Back when Sean Connery had a rich head of hair, Q had all the cool gizmos. Bond never faced SPECTRE without the latest high-tech geegaw, whether it be a fountain pen that accepted trans-Atlantic phone calls or a short-wave briefcase.

Now we are all James Bonds. John and Jane Q. Public have assumed the role of latter-day Techno-Dudes. You don't schedule your appointments on a Palm Pilot? No two-way pager? Your Urban Assault Vehicle isn't equipped with Global Positioning Satellite software? What are you, some kind of loser?

As this special section devoted to personal technology and communications illustrates, Digital Correctness has arrived. Just as H.L. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy," the technology wizards are inculcating a similar paranoia in working Americans: Someone, somewhere is trying to reach you. Can you afford to be out of touch?

That is certainly the core message behind the $140 million ad campaign for Iridium, a network of 66 satellites backstopping a global cellular phone system. Their first television ad flashed a picture of an abandoned ship and isolated trees in the Namibian desert, with the voice-over: "He is somewhere out there. Alone. desperate to hear from you. The fate of his business depends on what you wanted to tell him." Why your key business contacts are roaming the Namibian desert is a question left unanswered.

Cell phones are the least of it. "With PageNet Two-Way, you can stay in touch with the office no matter where you are," reads one newspaper ad. "Receive e-mails in a cab. Send an e-mail in the middle of a meeting."

A company called Xybernaut is working on a $500 wearable computer, which purports to "have the power of a desktop." The processor sits on your belt like a Walkman. The user wears a head set and gazes into a tiny "screen" cantilevered out in front of one eyeball. After "wearables" come "disposables," a new generation of $300 computers so cheap that consumers can throw them away after a few years.

So how about "disposable wearables"? Great idea! That's called "convergence," the hot buzzword in personal tech. The best-known example was WebTV, which turned your TV set into an Internet browser. Everyone thought that was a great idea; everyone except the consumers who were asked to pay for them, that is. But miscegenation remains the order of the day as the wizards of Silicon Valley cross-breed devices more or less at random. On display now: a telephone with Internet browsing capability. (Great ad campaign: reach out and search someone.)

Three companies -- Nokia, Qualcomm and Philips -- are working on what Newsweek calls "the all-purpose super-gadget," merging the functions of the Palm Pilot and the cell phone. Hey, let's mate a fax machine with a Cuisinart and see what happens!

So, you want to know what's coming next? Panasonic and others are already selling PalmTheater, a portable hand-held video machine that plays DVD video discs, whatever they are. The Wall Street Journal assures us that High-Definition Television is the very next thing. Panasonic's device costs $7,000, weighs 250 pounds, and barely fits through the door. How can you afford to be without it? Twenty years ago, mocking this kind of frippery might have branded you as a Luddite. Now you're merely normal.

To be fair, some new gizmology has redeeming qualities. A recent version of the Sony HandyCam video camera had a NightShot capability that, when activated in daylight, made it seem like people had no clothes on! Sony has since disabled this function. But seriously, why can't the gadget guys come up with something we really need? How about an answering machine with voice-recognition software that tells my mother-in-law we've moved to Ulan Bator? Or an intelligent remote control for my TV that filters out Chris Matthews when I'm channel-surfing?

That's what it would take to drag me into the Digital Age.