Disconnected

But Siriously, what did we do before the advent of the smart phone? Well, we had to write with a pen (not stylus, you techies!) on paper, for one. Remember those address book/diary/planner thingies....wonder what happened to all that cheap plastic/leather and paper? Oh, I'm pretty sure they are still in your home.....flew back from China after being morphed into another useless possession. We used those to keep track of important things in our life. We would take notes on a notepad and stop at a gas station or convenience store for directions. We would wait to get home so we can connect with family and friends over the land line. Now we just bark at our phones. A while ago, when the first Bluetooth earpieces were the in-thing, my MIL and I were out on a walk. She saw this man pacing around in circles, having an animated conversation with what appeared to be himself and with a very sad face said..."Paavam, avannukku yenna prachanaiyo, let me pray for him!" Wonder how she will react now to people yelling in helpless rage at their phone while the phone replies in gibberish.


This talking personal assistant is a bit worrisome though.....my offspring talk for hours to the phone and the phone replies patiently, albeit with attitude. Just to put this in perspective, when I ask how school was, they reply in monosyllables. The line thins between the human and the robotic and the robots are winning, at least in my home. We have more gadgets in our home than we do windows.......a bit disturbing if you ask me. Hand-helds are changing the way that we socialize, even becoming our security blankets in an uncomfortable situation. Awkward pauses in conversation are a thing of the past....people just whip up their phones and disappear into a personal virtual world and come back, for want of a better word, re-charged. In everybody's defense though, it is easy to get lulled into believing that the phone is a real person, because even I find myself talking to the phone a lot these days. However, the other day I asked if it would like to talk about feelings and got the following reply..."I'm not sure I understand....would you like me to run a web search for that?" And then, I remembered that many men were possibly behind programming the smart phones. Droid! I didn't just say that, but come to think of it, somethings are still comfortingly familiar!


Addendum: I found this hilarious and pertinent to the post...Enjoy!