One Stolen Accordion
There is a social media site that I now connect with that throws me bits and pieces about local goings on. It’s called Nextdoor and it has spread in it’s twelve-year existence to encompassing 116,000 local areas, serving over ten million members. That is still a relatively small fraction of the population, but if we assume it is more popular in non-urban settings, that is quite a lot of users. The U.S. now has a population of 330 million, of which 308 million are considered to live in urban areas. That is quite an amazing statistic wherein 97% of the country is urban with only 3% in rural areas. That may be an overstatement since urban is a relative term and there are supposedly 3,573 such urban areas in the country. I tend to agree more closely with the broader statistic that suggests that 83% of the country is comprised of urbanites. That compares to the world urban population of around 56%. The really interesting statistic is that that number was closer to 30% when I was born and closer to 15% when my mother was born in the early part of the Twentieth Century. But still, whether you use 97% or 83%, Nextdoor covering ten million members represents somewhere between an 18% to 45% penetration rate. That means that a lot of us non-urbanites look to this little app to stay in touch with what is happening locally.
We have all heard for years about the decline of local newspapers. Those that are left are more penny-saver free advertising papers than real local news papers. Most people (I will use Kim as the “normal” American in this example) get their news from the internet with a splash of cable news. I notice that Kim is on her phone first thing in the morning from bed and spends our evening of TV viewing with her iPhone on some combination of Words With Friends and online n Wes. Her mornings go-tos are Wordle and online news. Word games are very big with Kim as a supplement to her daily diet of online news.
Among my family and friends, I find that people are generally very up-to-date on the news as the day goes by. When I notice some news tidbit that catches my imagination to the point of my mentioning it, I find that most of those around me say that they too had heard or noticed that. Some are less glued to their devices than others, but most see the news flashes and alerts that cross all of our screens every moment of the day. I am going to presume that awareness of current events is more a good thing than a bad thing, so I will generally say that we do not seem less well-informed in this era of declining local news coverage. But of course, that view implies that the important things we need to say current about are things of global and national news and less so about local news. I am probably showing my more urban lifestyle and upbringing by saying that since I think of local news as a nice to know not a need to know.
This morning I was cleaning out my online inboxes as I am in the habit of doing and the process involves clearing my iPhone of all those nasty little red circled numbers attached to my app icons. For the record, I have twenty-four app groupings on my iPhone. That consists of 151 individual apps. Of those, I define seven as social media, seven as communications and seven as news. As an aside, the most heavily populated grouping is Productivity with eighteen apps , followed closely by Smart Home with seventeen. But I think of those first twenty-one apps as the ones that work hard to keep me informed. The omission from that list that gets its own ungrouped app is email, which is my first among equal app since I am a go-to emailer who only uses texting somewhat. That alone identifies me generationally, since younger people are far more text and messaging oriented than e-mail oriented. Kim uses texts much more than email and she and I are in the same generational cohort, but I attribute that less to our age difference than to the fact that my email preference stems from a more active work life than she most recently had. Email is the vehicle of most work. My sons are another interesting example. The older one (now 40) is more like me in preferring email. The younger one (27) is far more text and messaging prone. My daughter, who is 36 texts more than email, but she has also been out of the working world for a decade now.
My point is that the 21 social media, communications and news apps on my iPhone are the ones that get most often populated with those annoying little red bubbles, which I am adamant about eliminating as often as they pop up. Part of keeping a neat iPhone to me is getting those bubbles eliminated. In fact, I have this one annoying red bubble with a 2 in it attached to one of my productivity apps (it happens to be the expert witness billing app that we use). For reasons I cannot get at, that red bubble will not be eliminated, so I have had to just get used to it since I refuse to jeopardize my record keeping by removing and replacing the app. But other than that one red bubble, my iPhone is almost always cleansed of red bubbles as soon as they arise. Its an interesting process, because to eliminate the bubbles, I have to glance at the list of those messages which propagate them and in so doing, I get the headlines.
This morning my Nextdoor app had two red bubbles, which is about par for the early morning course. As I was clearing them in my morning sweep-up, I noticed that one of them was a piece about a local car break-in where somebody had their accordion stolen from their car. That one stopped me in my app sweeping tracks. You don’t see many accordions any more and I must say they are not a big part of life as I know it. Pianos and guitars are ubiquitous. I am within ten feet of a piano and a ukulele as I sit here (both are Kim’s). But one rarely sees an accordion even though many youth of my generation were compelled to learn how to play the beast and I would venture to say that I heard accordion playing almost every week of my youth someplace or another. In fact, at my first wedding, my father-in-law insisted on supplying the entertainment for our brunch wedding reception at Stauffer’s in Garden City, New York from his pal Iggy and his accordion.
When I read in my 2022 version of the local news about the mysterious theft of someone’s accordion, it confirms my suspicion that there is less and less need-to-know coming our ways from local news sources. We get our traffic news from our navigation and gps apps. We get our sales news mostly vis email junk mail blasts. But I guess, if we really want to know what is going on in the local burglary trade, we need a local news app like Nextdoor. Now I am going to have to find out where I can go to find a replacement for the classified ads to see where there might be an accordion for sale.