Ethical Consumption and Needing the Latest Gadget (Again)

The new iPhone is released tomorrow. Did you pre-order yours? Are you anxiously waiting for the delivery van? Or are you going to get up early tomorrow morning to stand in line at one of the few retail stores that is purported to have a small supply of them?

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 4 at Apple's WWDC last month, did you say to yourself, "I need one"?

Did you catch yourself saying it in the voice of the Lord of the Rings character Gollum: "We needs it"? OK, maybe that's just me.

As was the case with the release of Apple's iPad, the pending release of the new smartphone seems to reduce a lot of us -- myself included -- to something akin to Tolkien's greedy, groveling monster. We want. We drool. We covet.

I really don't need a new phone. I have an iPhone already. And while it's arguably my favorite and most important tech tool - a device that rarely leaves my hand - the phone I have works just fine. Why would I "need" a new one?

Yet I still feel compelled to get a new iPhone. I can justify it and rationalize it so easily: my phone is a 3G and won't run the new operating system that was released this week. A new iPhone will only cost me a couple hundred bucks. The new iPhone has so many more features. It has so much more storage, more power, more zip.

But none of these reasons come close to constituting a "need." If I buy an iPhone (and I will, I confess), it's because of the pressures of my job as a tech blogger to have the latest tech tools. It will be because of the pressures to keep up with the latest tech trends. It will be because of the pressures of technology to always replace, always upgrade, always consume.

The trick, of course, is to be able to adopt new technologies with care and caution, to discern between what we want and what we need. I am by no means a master at that, as I find myself so easily swayed by the lure of a new tech tool. But it's important nonetheless to try to stop our desires for the latest, shiny gadget from reducing us to a monster.

Photo Credit: Flickr