Viewport

Monday, November 19, 2012

Smart phones are dumb

I was approaching a revolving door in my building lobby the other day and the guy in front of me stops in his wedge of the door and reads a message on his smart phone. Seriously? Who does this? Apparently a guy focused on whatever text or e-mail he is getting does. Who cares who is behind you or around you when you are in the "connected" zone.

So I have come to the conclusion that the smarter the phone, the dumber the person using it.

Being an admitted hypocrite, I do have a smart phone. But I've only had it for a couple of months. Before that I had a Blackberry which as phones go is as sharp as a river rock. For one, they don't have a touch screen and all of the apps you get for them are pretty lame.

My Android smartphone has the potential for thousands of useless apps. So far I only use one for solitaire and another for Angry Birds. The rest of the time I spend obsessively checking my e-mail which is pointless since a bulk of the e-mails I get (now that the election is over) are from Groupon or Living Social offering me great deals on Brazilian wax jobs.

I do miss the days when the closest thing to a mobile phone was a cheap walkie talkie that only picked up static and the occasional garbled word from one of my brothers. We couldn't even fathom the need to be connected to a telephone 24/7. I barely can stand a conversation with anyone in person for more than 30-seconds let alone walking around talking constantly through a Blue Tooth earpiece like someone with multiple personalities talking to people who aren't really there. We did have a few people who walked around talking to no one in particular when I was a kid, they just were more clearly identifiable as having lost the cheese off from their cracker than people are today.

Having said all of this, I pretty much can't cope without my smartphone. I begin to twitch if I go anywhere without it. And I panic and hold it up in the air if I don't see at least two bars on the signal indicator. I also feel a bit inferior that I don't have a 4G connection even though I haven't a clue what that is. I think it is the telephone equivalent to a Hemi (which I also don't have a clue about).

I remember an old Twilight Zone episode called, "Night Call"  about a person who started getting phone calls from some unidentified person every night. Anyway the person finally discovers that a telephone line had broken and fallen on the grave of her dead fiance (who was killed in a car crash while she was driving), thus giving them a direct line to the dead.

So I kind of wonder if the next generation of smartphone is going to offer an app that allows you to talk to dead people (another twist on unlimited family plan that I imagine ATT will manage to assess some new fees on). Maybe we'll even start burying people with smartphones. But then I imagine we'll get calls from our dead relatives complaining that we only buried them with a 3G phone.

1 comment:

Helen Baggott said...

I have a very basic mobile and I hope it remains that way. I don't feel the need to be in touch with the world 24/7 - nor do I want the world to reach me.


If only I could do with out the internet...