When Reality Knocks

Welcome to another edition of When Reality Knocks Lifestyle and Technology Guide. I’ve been concentrating a lot on technology lately, so today’s post will cover territory in both Lifestyle and Technology. As Maclean’s magazine tells us, any new technology goes through several different stages as it permeates the culture: innovators, early adopters, early majority and then those perennially behind the 8-ball. Many new technologies, especially over the past few years, have promised to solve all of our problems, promised to bring new insight and sophistication to our interactions with others. Many of these technologies, however, have failed to live up to these extreme claims and, indeed, have become tiresome and even kitschy when they achieved wide-spread acceptance and that is certainly the case with today’s topic: Thong underwear.

Time magazine tell us that thongs are on the way out, or certainly on the way back to the edges of fashion. Thong underwear was touted as the pinnacle of high-tech, high-end female underwear technology, meant to enhance self-image, self-expression, sexuality, and to get rid of those pesky underwear lines, but it has turned out to be mainly a pain in the rear. A few years ago, the innovators and the early adopters embraced with a passion this new underwear technology, a sort of hipster gitch, but as the early and late majority adapted their lifestyles to the new thong technology, it became increasingly evident that, while thongs are ideally suited for special occasions, for everyday wear, well, the claims of enhancing lifestyle and self-expression through this new technology were wildly exaggerated. It was said that females could express themselves with a sort of round 2 girl power through wearing thongs, but in the end this new technology just wasn’t up to the job: Butt floss just doesn’t do everything they claimed it did. As always, many new technologies get blown out of proportion: Eternal consumer vigilance seems to be the price of personal comfort.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Lifestyle and Technology, How to be Cynical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.