If you have to explain a joke

Apparently people, by that I mean, person, thought I was making fun of the Amish yesterday. In the future I will try to stick with more easily understood humor such as patronizing women.

First off, I want to clarify something: the Amish are not actually low-tech or anti-technology. They are instead a lone group (or really several groups with shared values) which has managed to maintain community and family by taking a hard stand against anything which would interfere with it. This doesn't mean rejecting technology, but it does mean approaching it differently.

Let's go ahead and look at the attempted humor and find who or what each part is making fun of.

When a trend sweeps the world, no one is left out, not even the Amish. They're really not so different from you and I, with many of the same concerns, troubles, and need to share really pointless information with people we know. But enough intro, let's get to the fun stuff: the technology!

The introduction is a parody of the usual "hot new trend that everyone is in on!" media frenzy. You can substitute anything from rappers using youtube to grandmothers using facebook.

We're all used to Twitter and its 140 character limit. But the Amish have jumped ahead of us with an impressive one-page limit. That's right, as many characters (make them tiny to fit more!), even drawings, that you can fit on a page. Amish teens, even adults, have been flocking to the popular service Letter, which allows users write, draw, or scribble anything they want on a piece of paper and then by adding it to a paper-thin 'envelope' and a CPU-sized 'stamp', send it anywhere in the world. Wow!

During work one day I was amused at how Letter and Twitter sound a bit similar and maybe Letter is a lower-tech version of Twitter. I figured it was a good opportunity to poke fun at the character limit and the death of carefully written letters. This wraps up with a reversal of the usual worship of small technology.

But as we all know, we can't tweet our entire identities. Fortunately we have Facebook. Not to be left out of the trend, Amish teens have adopted the compact technology Book which effectively binds together a collections of Letter messages, know as Lits, which can then be traded around and written in. However the most common usage is by the major publishing companies who are using Book as a medium to sell and share stories and ideas around the world, even beyond the Amish community. In fact, I picked up several Books just the other day.

We don't read as many books as we used to. Also it seems that any new technology is seized upon as the hot new way to sell stuff.

Ever innovative, they've even created a low-cost alternative to camera phones with a bundle of services known as Shouting, Long-Term Memory, and Descriptive Skills. It has even been suggested that extensive use of the LTM and DS services can improve test scores and life outcomes.

Comments were accurate: I was mocking a culture and that culture wasn't the Amish: it was our own. We forget everything the next day and no longer use words for any specific meaning, but instead to convey generic feelings of good or bad, such as fascism meaning really bad rather than describing a system of government (which historically has not worked particularly well).

I was unable to reach any Amish for comment due to range and connection difficulties with my end of the Shouting service.

This was just me being silly.

Besides, even if I was attempting to offend the Amish, is this really the best medium?
*ahem*
Zing.