Week 3 Thing 7 Anything about Technology!

I'm not sure if this is more about technology or about a sociological phenomenon, but isn't the cell phone culture we live in interesting? No one in my family ever had one until I was a teenager with my own car (Mom had this silly idea that I might need it if I ever got into a car accident . . .), and now we live by them. My husband and I don't have a landline phone in our apartment, and my mother and sister just moved to a new home, where they don't have a landline either! Everyone has cell phones - I do double takes in the library when I see 7 or 8 year old kids with phones clipped to their belts. And then there's the whole Bluetooth phenomenon - it's always comforting to see someone walking through the library talking to himself and then see that it's just the tiny little phone in his ear. So much better than the other people who walk around the library talking to themselves . . .

But it's not just the widespread nature of cell phones - it's the dependence we have on them. I know that I, at least, feel as if doom will strike me if I'm ever without my phone. I had one die on me when I was in college, and I was completely cut off from the outside world until I could get a new one. Nobody could call me because I hadn't bothered to give them my dorm phone number (I was never there, so what would be the point?) I couldn't call anyone because I didn't know anyone's phone number (Why bother? I'd put them all directly into my phone!) And while this is a part of myself that I don't like very much, I haven't done anything to correct it - after all, my new phone works perfectly!

My husband spent two years in Bolivia, and he said one of the sights he saw regularly was a farmer outside his cinderblock house, plowing the field with his donkey, talking on his cell phone. What a world!