Oh, man. Here we go. I bought a smart phone yesterday; my first and (I think) biggest step into everyone's real world. It was truly out of necessity and nothing else. The thought of wrapping my entire life into a little device that is not even Jamie-proof is a bit ludicrous. The thing isn't anything-proof. For a long time, I have resisted the whole idea of a smart phone. If I really believed that it would remain just a phone and not become a limb and a crutch, it would not have been such a fight. I probably would have gotten one long ago, lured in by Angry Birds and baited by Words with Friends. But a phone should be a phone, really. It should allow one to text and to call and to take pictures of beautiful or funny things and send them to friends. To be honest, the camera thing is even a bit much, although I certainly have taken advantage and sent some nice jealousy shots. A phone should be a phone.
A smart phone is a second brain. One I have seen people lean so hard on that when it gets dropped or cracked or just decides to stop working, as most things with on switches eventually do, the people leaning fall so hard that they can't even stand up without a new one already on the way. You get a phone. You install Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail, Tumblr, news updates, app updates, sports updates, iTunes, a calendar, a memo pad, GPS and you throw in some games because people do not know how to sit still anymore, and suddenly you are not you without the phone. Losing it is tantamount to losing, almost literally, everything you know about yourself.
Now, I'm not exactly one for paper calendars or planners. The primary reason for this newly purchased second brain was my total inability to keep my own schedule. I can write something down in a planner and never look at it again. Without an annoying beeping noise to remind me that I am supposed to go to the wedding of my mother's friend's son this Saturday, the event is entirely forgotten and left behind for the prospect of playing flag football with my friends that same day.
**This is exactly, without exaggeration or altering, why I bought this phone. The wedding is this Saturday. So is football. I have double booked.**
So now I have a portable, talking planner. I am not going to install Facebook. I don't want GPS. I want to be able to survive without the thing, since it will probably get dropped in a toilet or in a snowball fight or something along those destructive lines.
There have been a lot of things to get used to in statesideville. Some are boring, like the cold or the price of rum. Some are less expected, like how difficult it is to remember to give pennies as change, or feeling lonely just because I am not constantly hearing other people's stereos. And one of the things I am trying to get used to is everyone's attachment to their little devices. If anyone has a question about something, Google is right there in your pocket. Dinners with friends are littered with bleeps and songs and spaceship noises, all of which generally need to be attended to immediately. I am not without guilt, here. Even my relic of a phone bleeped rudely with text messages, and I found it difficult not to check it right away. I have turned away from face to face conversations so that I could slide open my electronic life and converse with someone who could have been 3 or 3,000 miles away. But, then, those were text messages. And only text messages. There was never a Facebook bleep. Or one for Twitter. Or an email. I developed a Pavlonian response to a single beep which meant a single thing. I'm not sure that I could handle drooling and fumbling for my phone for multiple bleep types. It's too much.
So I will continue to resist, even as the black rubber-covered thing sits in my purse and begs to be an addiction. I will silence it when I have dinner with friends. I will write directions on pieces of paper and not count on my phone to get me anywhere. I'm not even going to install Angry Birds. There will be a lot of these fights as I walk farther and farther away from that island. But I still have different colored fingernails, I don't have cable, and I will not- NOT - allow my smart phone to be more important than the life that is actually happening right in front of me.
1 comment:
I have a smart phone, too, and while I do have some of those things on it, I don't like to use it unless I have to. I'd rather check my email and facebook on a computer, so unless I'm bored at a doctor's office or something, I don't use it for those things. I do, however, now have books on my phone. I think this is wonderful. :)
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