New Yorker cartoon editor finds humor in high tech

In this story: If you build it, they will buy 'It's a horsepower thing' RELATED SITES

(CNN) -- Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker magazine, is plugged in. Hooked up. Hardwired. He has all the accoutrements of man in the midst of the Internet age: laptop, electronic organizer, cell phone.

And all of this high-tech wizardry has taught him one important lesson: "Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong -- but twice as fast as it used to."

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Mankoff expands on that theory in "The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons," a collection of New Yorker cartoons that highlight what he calls the "love-hate relationship" between people and technology.

Why technology cartoons? Partly because you can't avoid the subject, Mankoff says. "For better or for worse, technology pervades everything," he observes.

And technology is a silicon-shiny fount of good humor, too, he adds, because of its "essential contradictions." Technology promises that "the world will somehow be transformed," Mankoff says, "but the reality is that the world is transformed by it, but we, unfortunately, remain the same."

Robert Mankoff

But where's the humor in that? "It's in the hope that it gives us and the frustration that it actually delivers," he says.

There is one more reason for a technology cartoon book, he confides. The New Yorker has published books of lawyer cartoons, medical cartoons, political cartoons, literary cartoons, doctor cartoons, even dog cartoons. Technology cartoons seemed like the only thing left.

The cartoons in the book were created by an array of New Yorker staff cartoonists, including Mankoff, and free-lancers. The publication of the book coincided with the magazine's annual cartoon issue, which came out November 13.

Technology was a natural for Mankoff. A self-admitted gadget guy, Mankoff says in the book's introduction, "I never met a consumer technology I didn't like. You build it and I'll buy it."

"Someone's been sleeping in my bed, too, and there she is on Screen Nine!"

In an interview, Mankoff recounts the time he went shopping for a bigger and better TV set. He found himself looking at two sets that looked identical, but were $400 apart in price. When asked why one set was more expensive, the salesman proceeded to extol the virtues of the higher priced set: "Well, this has the XPR filter with the 500-line distinguishing microprocessing ... "

Mankoff, of course, bought the more expensive model. "I wasn't going to not take the one with the whatever it is," he says now.

Mankoff says the humor in the relationship between people and technology comes, in part, from the fact that "people are funny because they're absurd in situations where they don't know they're absurd."

"I love the convenience, but the roaming charges are killing me."

And Mankoff knows of what he speaks. He recalls the day he brought home a brand-new 36-inch flat-screen TV. After three days of watching movies on the new box, Mankoff's wife turned to him and said, "Is it still big?"

So we'll never quite get ahead of technology. It will continue frustrate and betray us, yet we will continue to buy and buy. Mankoff attributes this failing to testosterone. "It's a guy thing. It's a horsepower thing," Mankoff says.

But seriously. It's not really the technology. The problem is us. We've becomes slaves to the machines meant to serve us, Mankoff says.

He refers to a 15-year-old, autobiographical cartoon he created for The New Yorker, included in the book: A man stands at a store counter filled with all sorts of high-tech products, gazing longingly at the display.

"All my gadgets are old," he says to the salesman. "I'd like some new gadgets."

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