What exactly do we hate about the wireless mobile headset? I ask as a fellow hater but also a discomfited user. The device is simple enough — a microphone and speaker that sits snugly in your ear, communicating to your tucked-away phone over the short-range radio protocol known as Bluetooth. Its advantages are straightforward and undeniable. A headset frees up your hands while you phone and drive, walk, type, shop, or just lie around. To slip one on is to feel surprisingly liberated, bionic, even. There’s a phone right in your ear! But also, you want the ground to swallow you whole: According to the prevailing social sensibility, anyone who dares to don a BT headset out in the world is a self-important, unrefined boob.
But why? For about a month, I’ve been testing a passel of Bluetooth headsets. My mission has been to find not the most functional device but the least outwardly offensive. More important, I set out to tunnel into the source of the offense. Why does it happen that when you see a fellow — and most of the adopters are men — Bluetoothing on the sidewalk you reach for your revolver? “Douche,” “asshat,” “tool,” “prick,” “poseur” and other irrational and nasty taunts begin to crystallize on your tongue. You call to mind the guy from that Onion article, “New Mobile-Device Purchase Makes Asshole More Versatile.”
My first thought was that the problem was aesthetic. A Bluetooth headset, like a wristwatch, is an example of what tech-biz geeks call “wearable technology.” But until recently most BT headsets, unlike most wristwatches, have not embraced the requirements of high fashion. The cheapest and most popular models are made of consumer electronics-grade plastic and aspire to the industrial design of Radio Shack rather than of Rolex.
Scala-700LX
The Cardo Scala, which you can pick up for $30 to $40, depending on the specifications, is typical. A silver or black teardrop-shaped doohickey that clings to your ear on a silicone arm, the device — which functions beautifully and has been my go-to driving headset for more than a year — resembles something the Jetsons might give to their robot maid Rosie as a stocking stuffer. It is a look underlined by the Scala’s most annoying feature: Right there on the front of it is a huge LED that blinks metronomically while the Scala’s on. Because wearing a gadget in your ear that doesn’t blink would not be nearly nerdcore enough.
Late last year, Aliph, a small company based in San Francisco, released a groundbreaking BT headset meant to shake up the industry’s aesthetic complacency. The Aliph Jawbone, cooked up by the renowned industrial designer Yves Béhar, is a black rectangular swatch with a high-gloss metallic face done in silver, black or red mesh.
Jawbone
The Jawbone has been greeted like a messiah by members of the tech press, who have justified its high price — $120! — on the grounds of its superior audio capabilities (Aliph adapted technology it developed for DARPA to reduce the ambient noise picked up from your surroundings), and its gorgeousness. The Jawbone, which has no visible buttons and only a tiny blinky light, is the BMW of headsets: It advertises to the world that you’re a comer.
Apple iPhone Headset
Aliph’s jolt to the industry worked. A number of companies have responded with headsets of similar flash, the most notable of which is Apple. The Bluetooth headset it designed as an accessory for the iPhone is even more stylish — and more expensive, at $129 — than the Jawbone. It is a tiny, shiny slab of black anodized aluminum, aggressively minimalist in the Apple way. Basically a 2-inch stick with an attached ear-socket, the headset has no over-the-ear loop and instead sits in your ear by the power of a snug fit alone.
MOTOROKR S9
I also tried the Motorola MOTOROKR S9, a stereo, two-ear device that can be used both for phone calls and for playing music (if you add a Bluetooth adapter to your iPod). The S9, which sells for about $70, looks like a wireless version of old-school behind-the-ear Walkman headphones; it’s red rubber and black matte plastic, and if you were looking for a marketing adjective with which to sell the device, “sporty!” would be your best bet.
Alas, though they worked well enough, none of those headsets seemed worth their pricey tags, because none quite solved the fundamental problem of public Bluetooth shame. (And also, the Jawbone was a bit cumbersome to get on my ear in a hurry. The Apple, which can be used with phones other than the iPhone, was very comfortable but kept slipping out of my ear. The Motorola wasn’t at all comfortable, and having two ears blocked doesn’t seem a good idea while driving — not to say, of course, that talking on the phone at all is a good idea while driving. It is not.)
If the chief difficulty with wireless headsets is that they telegraph self-importance, a device that goes out of its way to stun people with its beauty seemed only to exacerbate the problem. Stepping out with my Jawbone, I feared that folks would regard the ostentation as out of place on the rest of my person, as if I’d added a neon kit and spinner rims to my 1995 VW Jetta. The Motorola and Apple headsets suffered a greater shortcoming: Because they’re so small, there’s no visible sign that you’re on the phone rather than having a conversation with that special friend in your head.
I began to wonder if maybe Aliph, Apple and Motorola had gone the wrong way. Instead of stylish and small, maybe a headset should be large and unmistakable, the better to tell the world, “Hey, I’m not crazy, I’m just on the phone!” If nobody minds, anymore, when you use a handheld phone while you’re on a sidewalk or in a shopping mall, why should they mind if you’re on a headset? They shouldn’t, I figured, just as long as they can see the headset right there in front of your face. And so I tried out the BlueParrot B100, absolutely, positively the biggest Bluetooth headset I could find.
BlueParrot B100
The BlueParrot is a classic telemarketer’s headset: A flexible band fits tightly over your head, a big sponge earpiece covers your whole ear, and a long boom places the mike right at your lips. It wouldn’t surprise you to learn that the BlueParrot is designed mainly for office use; its cell phone capabilities are given only a glancing mention in the user manual. To take it on the go almost seems like a gag — indeed, too much so. Though it would probably reduce confusion — if you’re wearing a BlueParrot, nobody will think you’re talking to yourself — I don’t know how well it would clear up the question of your sanity.
And then, I saw it. I’d been searching for a fashionable but not flashy headset, a model big enough that people wouldn’t think I was hearing voices, but not so big that I looked like a volunteer in a telethon.
Cardo S-640
Meet the Cardo S-640, whose innovative design makes for a thoroughly satisfying headset experience. The S-640, which is $65, is two parts — an inch-long black metallic body that contains all the electronics, and a standard earbud attached to the body with a wire. Yes, this wireless headset’s got a wire. The body clips to your lapel or collar; you loop up the wired earbud to your ear to listen and to talk.
The clip-on set-up — which only a few other headsets mimic — offers several advantages over the all-in-ear design. First, it’s visible: The headset is right on your clothing for everyone to see, and the wire leaves no mistake: “Please do not be alarmed,” it announces to the world, “I am presently engaged in some kind of electronic endeavor.” Also, you look like a Secret Service agent, which isn’t so bad.
At the same time, though, the S-640 is unobtrusive. The part in your ear is rather small — as small as an iPod earbud and just as comfortable — and, when you’re not on the phone, the earbud tucks neatly into the piece affixed to your collar (the whole device vibrates when you get a phone call). In other words, you don’t have to keep it in your ear all the time, and thus your time looking like a tool is kept to a minimum.
The S-640 is not perfect — the biggest problem I had was activating it while I was in the middle of a phone call (it did so only intermittently). But sound quality — on my end and the other end — was quite good, even in noisy environments.
Does the S-640 make Bluetoothing in public OK? Not entirely. Conduct a poll among your friends — unless you work on Wall Street or Silicon Valley (bless you), chances are you’ll find that most people consider it a no-no. But the design does offer a way to grease the wheels of social acceptability.
Bluetooth headsets seem to be at the point that cellphones were about a decade ago — on the cusp of mass acceptance, with people beyond first adopters beginning to realize their utility. If these things do in time become as popular as phones themselves, adopting models like the S-640 would be a good way to reduce that chance that everyone thinks everyone else is a total douche.
Correction: I initially wrote that the Jawbone didn’t have a blinking light. Actually, there is one, but it’s so small I hadn’t noticed it. It blinks white while the unit’s on.
It isn’t necessary to explain how, in the pilot episode of “MacGyver,” our mulleted, Midwestern hero gets himself trapped inside a top-secret research bunker overflowing with sulfuric acid. Suffice it to say, he needs to find a way out, and probably soon (because government agents are fixing to fire a missile at the bunker to prevent the acid from spilling into a nearby aquifer). Plus, he has to save the people he has found inside (among them a gun-wielding climate scientist who wants destroy the bunker in an effort to set back research into an ozone-layer-ruining weapon of mass destruction). Fortunately, MacGyver has a few chocolate bars, a scrap of sodium metal, a cold capsule, a pair of binoculars and cigarettes.
He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.
But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.
This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.
Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.
But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.
Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.
I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.
There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.
But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.
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Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.
Today much of the tech world is sad that the iPhone 3G’s launch is going so miserably. But I’m sad that it’s my last day at Salon.
I’ve accepted a job at Slate, where, starting next week, I’ll be writing a twice-weekly technology column. Machinist will go on a break for a week, after which a guest blogger will bring you the latest tech dish.
I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.
I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.
– Farhad Manjoo
As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I’m getting ready to depart this space; I’ll have a fuller explanation tomorrow, sometime before or after I get in line to buy the new iPhone.
In the meantime, I thought I’d add a note about one of the more fun events related to my book’s release — the opportunity I had, in May, to speak at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.
Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:
Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.
If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.
Update: This post has been updated with comments from Viacom.
In the fall of 1987, a freelance reporter named Michael Dolan learned that judge Robert Bork kept an account at Potomac Video, a D.C. rental shop. This was at the height of the contentious and ultimately failed Senate confirmation hearings for Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court — so naturally, Dolan thought there was a story here, and he went to work on getting a peek at Bork’s video rental history.
It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”
That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.
Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.
In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.
I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.
Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.
The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.
Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)
Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.
But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).
But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)
All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.
But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.
As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.
What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!
In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.
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Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.
Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.
Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”
