For years I resisted. My old Nokia 8310 was still just about working. For about three years it kinda only intermittently worked and if I picked it up the wrong way it would stop working but I persevered. I didn’t want to join the smart phone revolution. Well either that or I was tight as hell and didn’t want to buy one. I’ll leave it to you to decide exactly how much of it was one and how much of it was the other.
Anyway I was reading a blog entitled Modern Technology Kind of Makes Me Want to Hurl by Grace over at the Confederacy Of Spinsters today and it must be said she is fast becoming one of my very favorite bloggers on the interweb. Her blogs surrounding the early days of her relationship with Professor McGregor are just wonderful. I have written about it before but it is one hell of a fine read and her use of the English language and the emotion that pours through really ticks all my ‘I want to read all of her stuff’ points.
So away from all that praise – that piece in question is about how much she at times hates her iPhone and that is something that resonates with me big time. ‘At any moment, my phone can beep out a demand that I talk to someone about my feelings.’ laments my favorite faceless Texan. That of course isn’t just an issue with smart phones but with mobile phones in general. We are always contactable. In this modern world we can never just disappear and whilst I wouldn’t say the phone ringing is a demand to talk to someone, it certainly puts a lot of pressure on you to accept the call as you never know if it is important or not.
In general I hate the phone. I think it’s a horrible invention. I use my phone as an actual phone so rarely that it is near enough pointless to actually have the phone function on it. I text a little bit but not a lot and use it far more to have the internet on the move. I check e-mail and twitter constantly and that keeps me plugged into the world but as for actual phone calls. No thank you.
I have always been that way though. I have never really enjoyed chatting on the phone. The phone is for information passing and not general chit-chat. One person may be happy for a chat but how do they know the other person is? The other person may actually be busy and not really in the mood for a chat but saying this is hard because the other person will near enough always feel a bit pissed off that you don’t have time for them.
Lord I dislike the phone. I suspect this is another reason why I’m single. I hardly know any relationship where the phone plays an insignificant role. In general I don’t like people just calling me because they are bored. I just don’t like it…
However of course I do love the internet on the move. I love being able to check things like train times when I’m out and about. I like being able to check websites for the latest news. Nothing really goes down in the world of sport or news that I might be interested in without it being on twitter. I can check football scores when doing radio. I am plugged into everything I want to be plugged into but that does come at a cost. In a way its lucky I don’t have too many friends and I hardly ever give out my phone number. I think I have 68 phone numbers in my phone book and they include people I haven’t spoken to for years.
Grace also talks about the goodness of e-mail and the way you can compose your response and change it before the response it sent and read. It is a bit like in online dating you can rehearse and change your opening message instead of walking over to someone in a club and saying something stupid and screwing up your chances before they’ve even started. Even text messages can be composed, checked and edited if needs be before being sent. Hurrah!
So to summarise I love being plugged into the world. However I also wish I wasn’t plugged into the world at all times. Life is just too complex at times. It really is.