The first time I saw one in a store, I couldn't figure
out what it was for and I had to ask my wife. "Oh, that's a fidget spinner," she said. "You don't need one." She's right there.
As most people under 20 (and a few people over 60) know,
fidget spinners are toys that you hold between your finger and thumb and
spin. That's it—that's the whole
show. When the fad showed signs of
getting really big, somebody rushed into production battery-powered
Bluetooth-enabled spinners. My
imagination obviously doesn't run in mass-marketing directions, because I
couldn't think of what adding Bluetooth to a spinner could do. Well, a quick Amazon search turns up
spinners with little speakers in each of the three spinning lobes (playing
music from your Bluetooth-enabled device), spinners with LEDs embedded in them
and synced to the rotation somehow so that when you spin it, it spells out
"I LOVE YOU," spinners with color-organ kind of LEDs that light in
time to music—you name it, somebody has crammed the electronics into a spinner
to do it.
But all this electronics needs super-compact batteries,
and where there's batteries, there's the possibility of fire. Already, there have been a couple of
reports of Bluetooth-enabled spinners catching on fire while charging. No deaths or serious injuries have
resulted, but the U. S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has put out a
nannygram, as you might call it:
don't overcharge the spinner, don't plug it in and leave it unattended,
don't use a charger that wasn't designed for it, and so on. I am not aware that teenagers are big
fans of the CPSC website, but nobody can say the bureaucrats haven't done their
job on this one.
The Wikipedia article on spinners discounts claims that
they are good for people with attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity, and
similar things. Seems to me that
holding a spinning object in your hand would increase distraction rather than
the opposite, and some high schools have agreed with me to the extent of
banning the devices altogether.
As a long-time manual tapper (no equipment required), I
think I can speak to that aspect of the matter from personal experience. Ever since I was a teenager or perhaps
before, I have been in the habit of tapping more or less rhythmically on any
available surface from time to time.
My wife is not exactly used to it—she will let me know now and then when
it gets on her nerves—but it's no longer a huge issue between us. Often when she asks me to stop, it's
the first time I've fully realized I'm doing it, and that's part of the mystery
of tapping or doing other habitual, useless things with your hands.
The most famous manual fidgeter in fiction was a
character in Herman Wouk's World War II novel The Caine Mutiny, Captain Philip F. Queeg, who had the habit when
under stress of taking two half-inch ball bearings out of his pocket and
rolling them together. (Queeg
lived in an impoverished age when customized fidget toys were only a distant
dream, so he had to use whatever fell to hand, so to speak.) During the court martial that forms the
heart of the novel, a psychologist is called to the stand to speculate on the
reasons for Queeg's habit of rolling balls. The doctor's comments ranged from the sexual to the
scatological, and will not be repeated here. But it appears that psychology has not made much progress in
the last seventy years to find out why some people simply like to do
meaningless motions with their hands.
That hasn't kept a lot of marketing types from making money off of them.
Fidget spinners are yet another example of the power of
marketing to get people to buy something they didn't know they wanted till they
saw one. I don't know what the
advertising budget was for the companies that popularized the toy, but I
suspect it was substantial. For
reasons unknown to everyone but God, the thing caught on, and what with
Bluetooth-enabled ones and so on, the marketers are riding the cresting fad
wave for all it's worth before it spills on the beach and disappears, as it
will. Somehow I don't think we're
going to see eighty-year-olds in 2100 taking their cherished mahogany spinners
out of felt-lined boxes for one last spin before the graveyard.
Like most toys, fidget spinners seem to be ethically
benign, unless one of them happens to set your drapes on fire. Lawsuits are a perpetual hazard of the
consumer product business, but the kind of people who market fad products are
risk-takers to begin with, so it's not surprising they cut a few corners in the
product safety area before rushing to the stores with their hastily designed
gizmos. By the time the cumbersome
government regulatory apparatus gets in gear, the company responsible for the
problematic spinners may have vanished.
Here's where the Internet and its viewers' fondness for exciting bad
news can help even more than government regulations. When hoverboards started catching fire a year or two ago, what
kept people from buying more of the bad ones wasn't the government so much as
it was the bad publicity the defective board makers got on YouTube. And that's a good thing, when consumers
who get burned (sometimes literally) can warn others of the problem.
As for Bluetooth-enabled spinners, well, if you want one,
go get one while you can. They'll
be collectors' items pretty soon.
And those of us who learned how to cope with tension the old-fashioned
way by drumming on a tabletop can at least rest assured that they aren't going
to take our fingers or tabletops away.
But they might tell us to stop tapping.
Sources: Slate's website carried the article
"New Fidget Spinner Safety Guidelines Prove We Can’t
Have Nice Things" by Nick Thieme at http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/11/cpsc_just_released_fidget_spinner_safety_guidelines_proving_we_can_t_have.html. I also referred to the Wikipedia
article on fidget spinners. Herman
Wouk's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The
Caine Mutiny was
published in 1952, and led to a film of the same name starring a considerably
miscast Humphrey Bogart.
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