• The Dark Heart of Your Digital Lifestyle

Enough with all the whining about the Blackberry Messenger mess or your iOS-5 download problems (or even a Windows Phone 7's Mango update). 

If you think you had a bad tech week, just look at my last seven days, during which I had: 

• A constantly crashing cable modem
• A near-dead cable DVR and set-top box
• A hellacious integration of my HBO-Go iPad app 
• An intermittently broken Wi-Fi router
• Plus: the aforementioned slow and painful Apple iOS-5 download

Let’s face it: we are utterly dependent upon a soulless swarm of networks, service providers, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.

Like crack dealers, they promise us a never-ending digital party (for a price), but never mention what happens when stuff just stops working. Or when something won’t do what it’s supposed to do. Or work with the other guy’s stuff.

So I figure I spent the equivalent of two full working days requiring nine different technicians (in person, online chat and phone) to get all this stuff to work (fingers crossed).

So, no matter how much I think I know about digital media’s “big picture,” at the nitty-gritty level, I’m just another schlub. And so are you. Consumers know that most aspects of their digitally defined lives are beyond their control, and always will be.

Which is why we’re so damned grateful when technology works well. (I'm convinced that this is the basis for the outpouring of love and gratitude at Steve Jobs’ passing. My friend Jean Firstenberg – a digital grandma -- calls her iPhone the 'idiot-Phone.' “Steve made it easy enough for grannies to handle,” she said in an email this week.

But mostly, consumers are dismayed at how many devices and systems they now have to manage, not to mention user names, passwords, log-ons, software patches and all the rest. If your refrigerator breaks, you call Sears. If your Internet screws up, you need a troubleshooter. Or a fulltime IT person. Or divine intervention.

The situation is even worse if you conduct business from your little digital hive, which many of us do, since 24/7 always-on broadband means nobody ever leaves their office.

A perfect storm of Tech Failure

So, when your Internet is down, it’s a crisis.

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