The Virus Revealed Our Essential Tech (and Weeded Out the Excess)

It has been weeks since the coronavirus brought our lives to a halt, shutting down our schools, offices and gyms. Stuck at home, we have had nothing but time to reflect on the things that matter.

Consumer technology — most of it, anyway — is low on the list.

That’s right. I’m admitting that many of the high-tech innovations that I regularly cover in this column — from foldable smartphones to doorbell cameras — are excessive, even if they are kind of neat. For years, tech companies have pushed ultrafast 5G networks, artificially intelligent speakers that talk to us, and other whiz-bang gadgets and features, but most of us aren’t using those bells and whistles now.

In a crisis, our most important tech — what we have turned to again and again — has boiled down to just a few basic items and services:

  • Computing devices with access to work tools and a browser.

  • Communication tools to stay connected with our loved ones and colleagues.

  • Entertainment to keep us from losing our minds.

  • An internet connection to let us do all of the above.

When you think about it, that’s all the tech we truly need even when there is no pandemic. That’s actually a nice revelation.

This short list can guide our priorities in tech consumption even after we come out of this uncertain period. It also means that we don’t have to spend much money to maximize our happiness with tech.

Zoom, the easy-to-use videoconferencing service, surged in popularity in the pandemic for an obvious reason: We are all desperate to see and talk to one another while stuck at home.

But our sudden adoption of Zoom led to discoveries of the product’s weak security, which could have allowed attackers to hijack our web cameras, among other privacy snafus. It also revealed that many of us were unprepared and hadn’t picked a set of robust communication tools.

The lesson: Now is a good time to work with our families, friends and colleagues to decide what communication tools fulfill our needs while respecting our privacy. Try to choose messaging and video-chat apps from respected brands.

For me, they’re Signal and FaceTime for messaging and video chats with my friends and family, and Slack and Google Hangouts for collaboration with my colleagues. Some of these apps take extra security measures to encrypt our communications, while others have strong track records of protecting our data from hackers.

So many people are streaming video in the pandemic that in Europe, Netflix and YouTube were pushed to temporarily stream videos in lower-quality formats to prevent breaking the internet. Nintendo’s Switch games console is also practically impossible to find, because the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a Nintendo exclusive, has offered us a sweet escape from reality.

We all obviously care about entertainment: We are spending hundreds of dollars a year on digital subscriptions, including video and music streaming services.

The lesson: This is a good excuse to treat ourselves. Buy a device that is good at delivering your entertainment, like a $350 to $1,000 TV from TCL or Sony, or a $92 Bluetooth speaker from Ultimate Ears.

source: nytimes.com