Recently I’ve been reduced to communicating by armadillo, a method slow and ungainly at best. One that would be difficult to explain. One that ended with my best friend banging on my door to see exactly where I was lying in an unconscious, incontinent puddle. I was just fine, it was my cel phone that had suffered a stroke, and I was quite tickled to know that in the event that I do become incapacitated, I will most likely be found first by somebody that won’t care that I’ve got my granny pants on.
Afterwards, I slunk to the Verizon store and got an ancient flip phone that had been mouldering in a junk drawer since 2005 reactivated, hoping to limp by with it until the inevitable happens a couple of weeks from now. Yeah, I’m tired of arguing with my cel service provider about why exactly I do NOT want an upgrade. Why I do NOT want to get a smart phone. I give in. The digital bullies have me pinned in a corner where I’m stuck helplessly wondering what the hell a 4G hotspot is and why anybody would want it. One of those G spots should be enough for anybody I would think.
In 1960 Ray Bradbury wrote the following;
“In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.”
I-phone, here I come. Wonder what Ray would think.
January 28, 2011 at 5:29 am |
I don’t care what he thinks in all honesty just get the gosh darn phone would you already!!
January 28, 2011 at 5:51 am |
Yes ma’am.
January 30, 2011 at 3:28 pm |
I had not read that quote from Bradbury before. That’s exactly what I think when I see people running with iPods… There’s a whole world out there to listen to. Pay attention!
I don’t want a smart phone until it has voice recognition and lets me talk in my programs.
February 6, 2011 at 12:40 pm |
“I was walking in a unimaginably huge, sprawling man-made environment, on artificial stone, so far from any place water flows or food grows that I didn’t even know the direction to point, with few birds in the sky and none but domestic pets near, and I was shocked — shocked! — so see someone with a radio. Probably listening to inferior entertainment, too. How stunningly clueless.”