Heading home for the holidays? Take a good long look at the true state of the nation

For a gear freak and tech junkie, it is striking, being in a terminal at John F. Kennedy airport, one of the busiest airports in the United States.

It is two days before Thanksgiving and late at night and I stroll through the almost empty concourse leading to my gate. My flight to Raleigh, North Carolina is delayed. I look around to see what the terminal is telling me about our lifestyle habits.

We own laptops and mobile devices. This is made evident by several Samsung “phone charging kiosks” — and we get wifi. An empty Boingo cart displays an opportunity to consolidate your wifi accounts and get the same kind of service at any airport.

But we must not be sophisticated enough to have flexible and adaptable mobile calling plans. A Sprint vending machine offers tantalizing phone calling cards. It is unclear whether these are for pay phones in the terminal or for travelers who don’t have or understand roaming plans.

There are several old fashioned video game stations–Galaga and Ms.PAC-Man.

And then there are tvs but all that shows is Larry King Live.
There’s a Sprint ad for a Samsung phone. In the background is a city that looks suspiciously like Hong Kong.

You can get free Internet at the hotel, a Radisson, down the street from JFK. Nothing like that here. See Boingo.

Nothing fancy other than some non-tech advertisements claiming “the original voice mail.” and two gleeful people, a man and a woman, hugging. “friend request accepted” it reads and the fuzzy halo of light surrounding the friends makes me think of James Taylor and the 1970s.

These are Dentyne ads. And the tagline says “Close Browser. Make Face Time.” I puzzle over this for some time, wondering at my immediate cynicism of this ad.

If it wasn’t for the Internet, I would never have moved to China, wrote for a newspaper that published a story of my trip to Burma, or even made it to India and made many friends and learned new languages.

You wouldn’t have this story, glimpsing — how ironically — an America that seems more third-world than the third-world did before it discovered the Internet.

[Sent from my iPhone in JFK International airport in New York.]