Over at Batflattery, Stephen ponders the nature of gadget addiction, iPod love and other 21st century obsessions.

Some of the most creative of us spend their working time persuading us that we can have it all, or at least that we can have what their clients are selling. (Spending so much time at it, no doubt, that they have no time to actually live out the precepts of their own creations.) And they are very, very good at it. The cumulative effect is a kind of life-spanning Attention Deficit Disorder, as we flit from one product to another, trying to capture the portrayed lifestyle and experience the ersatz pleasure we see acted out with such consummate skill before our eyes, but without enough precious time to invest in any of them to really make it work. Serial frustration, always falling short of the impossible dreams of advertising.

I suspect that, as someone who spends most of his time writing for consumer magazines, I’m one of the creative types he’s talking about: as the word “consumer” suggests, most magazines have an overt or covert agenda, which is “buy stuff”. The agenda’s overt with “what car”, “what camera”, “what stick” and so on, but Whether it’s Q, Empire, Word, GQ, computer magazines, Official Xbox magazine or any other title, the purpose of most consumer publishing is to persuade people to buy things. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it keeps me in a job, for a start – but it’s important to keep your brain working when you read that a £500 laptop case will change your life.