Wednesday 7 April 2010

Giving It The Big 'iAm'

Me and Her Indoors went for a drink in a local wine bar last Sunday, and - it being the Easter weekend - there was a real mix of people. There were young couples, young couples with parents, people on their own, and old people together, BUT, they all had one thing in common. They were all either using an iPhone or Blackberry, or they had one on the table, ready on standby.

Now, I do not live on a boat or caravan, neither am I a member of the MOD or Her Majesty's Government. I have a top of the range iMac at home which is constantly updated with all the fresh gizmos, etc, and I have a camera which is about the size of a half house-brick, which has 4 mega pixels, unlike most mobile phones which are around 12. I have a mobile phone which sends and receives calls and messages, and it has a couple of games on it, called 'snakes', which I never use. It has a colour screen for some reason. It suits me fine.

So we were reading the papers, and I noticed that there were many offers for smart phones, which included FREE icons which you could use - for instance - to find out where your nearest branch of Starbucks is, or what the cinema has to show you.

The people that subscribe to this (expletive deleted) are (expletive deleted) as far as I can make out - actually PAYING to have Starbucks send you a map via satellite, just so you can go and spend £4 on a cup of coffee with them???

There is something really disturbing going on with modern technology right now, to the detriment of ordinary social life.

Thank God that the iPad does not seem to want to connect with anything beginning with www. - I can't say I blame it. That's what iCall REAL Artificial Intelligence.

9 comments:

  1. I have an iPod touch, which is just like an iPhone without bluetooth or G3 or whatever the hell it is, and I am extremely conscious of not using it in public because the sight of others doing it has always annoyed me.

    In some ways, I think all these little gadgets are good because they connect us on a cerebral level, and open up a world of learning that wasn't available before. The downside would be a lack of real interaction, which is a real need for humans. It closes a certain section of the mind which requires that organic experience of real life.

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  2. I sound really pretentious here, so I just want to admit to how addicted I am to my stupid iPod touch. I'm just not flashy and so never use it in public.

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  3. Oh, I really don't mind people using these things, Amy, but I hate it when they just cannot leave them alone, and are too busy communicating with other friends to actually talk to the ones right there in front of them. I love gadgets too, but I value people more highly.

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  4. My best mobile phone ever was a beautiful little white thing that only did calls, texts, and a flashing blue light. None of all the other useless stuff you get on phones. I would pay good money not to have to live with all that technojunk I never use. It demeans me to have it busying its bytes fruitlessly in my pocket.

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  5. Yes, I agree, people are more important. And there's something weird about us—people in general—having to tell the world about everything we do every second that we do it. I have a twitter account mostly for my music, and instead of saying what I'm up to I like to play with people's minds. LOL. I love saying surreal things and waiting to see who gets it or who thinks I'm just nuts.

    But yeah, there is nothing more annoying than being next to someone and having to listen to their conversation to SOMEONE ELSE.

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  6. Orange has just marked out a small square of woodland, about a mile from (and above) us, where they will erect an aerial. Yippee, we should have mobile phone signals before 2012.

    But don't think France is backward; we already have The Wireless, Television, and the Motor Car. Oh yes, and Nuclear Weapons.

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  7. I was standing on the West Coast of Scotland once, looking at Tobermory in the distance, over the Sound of Mull. The silence was wonderful. Then, a peeping sound in my pocket told me I had a text message from someone in Bath. I wondered how it could have arrived in such a remote and out of the way place, but Her Indoors pointed to a huge mast which had escaped my notice, just over the water.

    I suppose I could have just turned the damned phone off for a few days, but now that the Genie is out of the bottle, we all wonder how it was we could have communicated with our friends before, and sales of paper and ink must have slumped dramatically. In 'I Know Where I'm Going!' mentioned previously, there is a scene where they are communicating with a neighboring island via a radio set in the local post office in 1943, and the elderly lady is saying, "Hello Kiloran, hello Kiloran, Tobermory speaking, Tobermory speaking."

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  8. Well said Tom! I am constantly being laughed at by my Iphone/blackberry friends for having an extremly old Nokia phone, with a very old cover. It does the job however, which is to text and phone! Iphones do have their uses but most people seem to think that they're a kind of status symbol. The new Porche!!!!

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  9. Ah, 'well said' now, you say, but that was before I awarded the fabulous prize to a Canadian.

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