I love my phone, my tablet, and my computer.
I hate my phone, my tablet, and my computer.
Do we all have love/hate relationships with our electronic gadgets?
I am delighted to have a communication device that sits in my pocket and connects to the world anytime I feel like it. Or I can sit with it while waiting in a doctor’s office and play games. Or I can look up anything on the internet, perhaps searching for a nearby restaurant. Or, if I have a problem with my car, I can call for help. I’ve become so dependent on my phone that I’ll even return home to retrieve it if I’ve forgotten to take it with me.
It's a far cry from my younger days when a single phone for the entire family was an extravagance. The party line was always fun. One learned to hang up immediately if attempts to make a call found someone’s voice already emerging from the earpiece. Unless you were a nosy little kid. If you needed to phone someone and you were away from home, you searched for a special booth and hoped you had enough change to complete a call. I can still hear an operator interrupting the conversation instructing me to insert another 25 cents and cutting me off if I failed to do so. I remember my mother placing a long-distance call, which was handled by a series of operators who passed it through several points before hookup. It could take some time as the patches were constructed. Mom asked me to hold the phone and call her when the call went through. When an operator finally announced the call was about to be completed, I yelled to my mom. The operator said, “Please don’t scream at me, madam.”
All very nostalgic. And all a far cry from the current power we possess and is the only telecommunications so many of my fellow citizens have ever known.
So what’s not to like?
Well, for me, plenty.
When I was young and the phone rang, there would be interest in rushing to answer it which became the job of the family member located the nearest. If no one was home, only the caller would ever know a contact had been attempted. Now, unless I’ve misplaced the phone, every attempted contact is noted and the nearest person to answering is the only person near it—me! This has created in me, and I think many, many others, a need to enslave myself to the phone and give answering a call or text message priority over conversation with those I’m with.
But enslaving myself isn’t the only problem. In the early days my family rarely if ever received solicitation calls. Now we have a whole old word with a new meaning, “spam,” to categorize them. The other morning I decided to count the number of spam calls that arrived: 15! At least my phone warns me about most of them so I can avoid answering. But it’s distracting and maddening.
And this isn’t even considering the calls that are made in the hope I will say “yes” which can be recorded and used later to prove agreement to some nefarious scheme. There is genuine danger in the technology that now shapes our lives.
So there is much to love about the phone, but there is a lot to hate too.
Similarly with the computer. I have vivid recollections of all night vigils writing term papers on my trusty Royal typewriter. You know, that old fashioned thing where a hunt for a delete key would fetch no reward. There was a real penalty for a mistake, and on a page of text there was bound to be at least one. The solution was either to retype or use Whiteout followed by insertion of the corrected character(s). And don’t get me started on carbon paper.
The computer has really transformed writing. I don’t think it has improved it, but it definitely is easier. Of course, there is so much more for which computers are employed, from composing music to generating art. Now where will AI lead? It’s hard to imagine life without that amazing device.
Not surprisingly, there are penalties. Rivaling the phone, one receives, via email, solicitation after solicitation. You can elect to unsubscribe, but there are downsides to that. Often your request is ignored. Or there always is a danger that clicking on that lovely word “unsubscribe” you assume will free you will instead unleash a virus into your system.
So yes, I’m glad we live in a time of cell phones and faster and faster computers (and tablets), but dealing with the problems can be time consuming and really, really annoying.
I hate my phone, my tablet, and my computer.
Do we all have love/hate relationships with our electronic gadgets?
I am delighted to have a communication device that sits in my pocket and connects to the world anytime I feel like it. Or I can sit with it while waiting in a doctor’s office and play games. Or I can look up anything on the internet, perhaps searching for a nearby restaurant. Or, if I have a problem with my car, I can call for help. I’ve become so dependent on my phone that I’ll even return home to retrieve it if I’ve forgotten to take it with me.
It's a far cry from my younger days when a single phone for the entire family was an extravagance. The party line was always fun. One learned to hang up immediately if attempts to make a call found someone’s voice already emerging from the earpiece. Unless you were a nosy little kid. If you needed to phone someone and you were away from home, you searched for a special booth and hoped you had enough change to complete a call. I can still hear an operator interrupting the conversation instructing me to insert another 25 cents and cutting me off if I failed to do so. I remember my mother placing a long-distance call, which was handled by a series of operators who passed it through several points before hookup. It could take some time as the patches were constructed. Mom asked me to hold the phone and call her when the call went through. When an operator finally announced the call was about to be completed, I yelled to my mom. The operator said, “Please don’t scream at me, madam.”
All very nostalgic. And all a far cry from the current power we possess and is the only telecommunications so many of my fellow citizens have ever known.
So what’s not to like?
Well, for me, plenty.
When I was young and the phone rang, there would be interest in rushing to answer it which became the job of the family member located the nearest. If no one was home, only the caller would ever know a contact had been attempted. Now, unless I’ve misplaced the phone, every attempted contact is noted and the nearest person to answering is the only person near it—me! This has created in me, and I think many, many others, a need to enslave myself to the phone and give answering a call or text message priority over conversation with those I’m with.
But enslaving myself isn’t the only problem. In the early days my family rarely if ever received solicitation calls. Now we have a whole old word with a new meaning, “spam,” to categorize them. The other morning I decided to count the number of spam calls that arrived: 15! At least my phone warns me about most of them so I can avoid answering. But it’s distracting and maddening.
And this isn’t even considering the calls that are made in the hope I will say “yes” which can be recorded and used later to prove agreement to some nefarious scheme. There is genuine danger in the technology that now shapes our lives.
So there is much to love about the phone, but there is a lot to hate too.
Similarly with the computer. I have vivid recollections of all night vigils writing term papers on my trusty Royal typewriter. You know, that old fashioned thing where a hunt for a delete key would fetch no reward. There was a real penalty for a mistake, and on a page of text there was bound to be at least one. The solution was either to retype or use Whiteout followed by insertion of the corrected character(s). And don’t get me started on carbon paper.
The computer has really transformed writing. I don’t think it has improved it, but it definitely is easier. Of course, there is so much more for which computers are employed, from composing music to generating art. Now where will AI lead? It’s hard to imagine life without that amazing device.
Not surprisingly, there are penalties. Rivaling the phone, one receives, via email, solicitation after solicitation. You can elect to unsubscribe, but there are downsides to that. Often your request is ignored. Or there always is a danger that clicking on that lovely word “unsubscribe” you assume will free you will instead unleash a virus into your system.
So yes, I’m glad we live in a time of cell phones and faster and faster computers (and tablets), but dealing with the problems can be time consuming and really, really annoying.
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