Gadgetry

Photo owned by The Silver Penguin (cc)

A  few years a friend told me about a new technology that BMW were putting in cars.  The volume of the car stereo went up when the engine noise went up. The volume automatically turned itself down when the car was stopped in traffic and the engine noise was lower. Cool hu?

I was thinking about this yesterday as I turned down the radio while waiting at a traffic light and all of a sudden the penny dropped. The problem is not with the radio it’s with the car. Cars are noisy. This is a hard problem to solve. Instead of performing extensive surgery and solving the real problem (noisy cars) the car makers gave us a cheap sticking plaster - gimmicky radios. The makers of the car (technology) gave the users (technologists) a clever solution to the wrong problem. It's a trick engineers love to play on technologists.  It's called gadgetry.