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I've got a cell phone but I don't use it all that much. I'm not really a phone talker. I never really have been, though I did love my cell back when I was a social butterfly. These days the phone mainly serves to catch up with mom or the occasional friend.
I've been pondering the iPhone. I'm locked in a contract with my current carrier for a couple more months but I was thinking about switching just for the iPhone. Being the Mac fan I am, it's hard for many who know me to understand why I don't have one yet.
You know, the iPhone plan is ridiculously expensive. What really irritates me is how much the additional text plan costs. By the time you add all the goodies and then slap on the taxes and fees, we're talking a hundred bucks a month or more for a modest plan. For a freakin' phone. It is a very cool phone, I freely admit. Lots of people I know have them. It's a little weird to be going about my day hearing the sound of emails coming into Mail in random places. The other day in a meeting this happened, and I got to thinking about it. Do I really want to be able to check my email anywhere at anytime? Is this really a good thing? Sometimes it gives me this creepy Matrix vibe that we're all so wired in all the time.
I was browsing the iPhone apps. The vast majority of them are time wasters by any rational standard. Others are debatable, though I have my doubts. There's one that keeps track of your spending and calculates tips for you. I can shove a receipt in my pocket and double the tax for a tip in a lot less time than I can pull out the phone, unlock it, launch the app, and type in all those numbers with the little digital keypad. There are apps for tracking oil changes and reminding you of this or that, shopping lists, etc. The other day I was at the bus stop and there were half a dozen people there waiting. No one was talking to each other. Indeed no one was looking up. Every single one of them had their noses buried in an iPhone, Blackberry or some other such device.
You know, try as I have, I've never been able to adapt to things like online calendars and applications to run the minutia of my life. I hate them, in fact, on the whole. Something is always going wrong. Too often it creates more work than it saves. I've still got an old fashioned photo calendar hanging in my office that I keep everything on. It never needs rebooting, it never inexplicably deletes anything, I don't have to click five times to see it. There are no software updates or viruses or upgrade costs, except for the $7 price tag when they go on sale for 1/2 price each December for the upcoming year. My photo calendar just always there, sitting quietly, exactly as I last left it and easy to view at a glance. I like that.
There's a song called Cowhand Dot Com where a cowboy is lamenting the modernization of everything. It's really cleaver and funny, but it always makes me a little sad too. He describes a "fancy" new ranch where cattle are scanned and tracked digitally and laptops and cell phones are a part of daily life. He points out that no matter how fancy the technology, you still have to step in shit. I guess the takeaway message for me is that too often technology has become little more than a distraction, an extra burden in a world that already has enough.
We live on a planet of 7 billion humans. It's hard to find a place where you aren't surrounded by people. And yet more than ever people are reporting how lonely and unhappy they are. We have too much stuff and our lives are too virtual. I'm not knocking the technology. It has brought us some amazing things. I'm knocking the rampant and excessive use of it, the attempt to shoehorn every aspect of humanity into it. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Studies have shown that in 1985 the average American claimed 3 friends they felt they could confide in. Today that number has dropped to 2, with 25% of Americans saying they have no one they feel they can confide in. Just the other day I claimed my blog was often my outlet. Since the 1950's, the percentage of Americans who claim to be happy has been plummeting. I think it's no coincidence that the trend is aligned with the proliferation of television and fast food, the near extinction of the family meal and neighborly neighborhoods, and the plugging in of Americans. How quickly a novelty can become the norm. Industrial agriculture and television step in and destroy major components of our social structure, and within a generation the old ways are forgotten to the ruin of our health and happiness.
I've been considering giving up my cell phone altogether. With Skype, for about $5 a month and no contracts you can still make and receive as many phone calls as you like, and there's any number of services that let you video chat computer to computer for free. The only disadvantage, if you can call it that, is that you can't make calls just anywhere, anytime, unless you are perpetually in the realm of wifi and have access to a device that can use it. I gave up TV years ago and haven't missed it. I watch an occasional episode of the Daily Show or whatever because now everything is online and free. But people always comment when they come into my home for the first time that the living room is so cozy and people-friendly. Then it strikes them, the room isn't centered around a television. It's centered around the people. There isn't a TV to be found in the place.
It isn't my wish to go back to living like the 19th century, though I do firmly believe there are important aspects of that way of life that serve humanity far better than their modern replacements. Cell phones are good. The internet is wonderful. Computers are fantastic. But when I think of how much money and resources we pour into these things, how much of our lives we try to live through them and what we are sacrificing as a result, yeah, I think we've gone too far.
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