American Pie: The Whole World In Your Hand?
...Then I heard the bad news I had been anticipating for a while; PC’s are likely to be superseded in large part by hand-held devices: cell phones, notepads, Blackberries and the like. This is not to say that PC’s will disappear, just that picking one up from a local retailer will not be easy, or perhaps even possible...
John Merchant, no technophobe he, is concerned at the develoipments in communications technology.
To read more of John's unmissable columns plesase click on
http://www.openwriting.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=john+merchant
And do visit his Web site
http://home.comcast.net/~jwmerchant/site/
Like everyone else in the USA who is over age five, my wife and I have a cell (Mobile) phone. I find it curious that the English, and some Europeans, use the term “mobile” even though the device is only mobile if someone moves it, but perhaps I’m being too semantical. First of all, note that we have just one cell phone between us. Also, if I tell you that neither of us wants to carry or answer it, you probably think we’re technophobic, but this is not true – we both have lap tops and PC’s, and make considerable use of them.
Our aversion is simply that we don’t feel the need to be in constant touch, and are grounded in an era when the phone was reserved for important communications too urgent to wait for a letter. I can almost hear the gasps of incredulous astonishment. Though we suspect our shared cell phone has all kinds of features, we have consulted the owner’s manual only to find out the barest essentials of receiving or making a call, or in attempts to untangle some glitch that has occurred.
From what I read, the latest models are capable of performing just about any task your imagination can dream up, via the multitude of apps (I hate that acronym) that the user can download: take a picture, browse the Web, make a movie, find your way through the jungle, check the weather, email, are just the tip of the iceberg. Yesterday I received my cell phone bill, which for the first time was $2 more than the usual total of the monthly fee plus all those mysterious taxes. The line item stated balefully “Data!”
Trying not to panic, my wife called our provider. After a long wait and some back and forth chat, she was told that it was a charge for accessing the Internet. Well, we hadn’t, and more than that, don’t know how to from a phone. Looking back over our bland account history, it was clear to the provider’s employee that we were not browsers, however unlikely that seemed in this age, so she agreed to void the $2. But the uneasy feeling lingered that we had somehow stumbled into a world we prefer to believe we can ignore.
Over the past several years, I have adopted the practice of replacing my computers every three years or so. This is in part an attempt to avoid having the beasts just die on me, but also to keep up with the changes in software and technology. The practice has served me well, and, touch wood, I have never experienced a crash. I usually start to window-shop and do research a few months before I want to make the change, and then plan a strategy for transferring my files and data.
My main PC is due for replacement now, and I have become concerned by the decline in the selection of computers in the stores. More than that, the new computers are only incrementally better than the one I have. At first I hoped this was because there was some massive technological advancement in the wings, causing the retailers to be constrained in their stocking, so as to avoid being stuck with obsolete models. But further research revealed no such impending innovation.
Then I heard the bad news I had been anticipating for a while; PC’s are likely to be superseded in large part by hand-held devices: cell phones, notepads, Blackberries and the like. This is not to say that PC’s will disappear, just that picking one up from a local retailer will not be easy, or perhaps even possible. Americans love to do stuff on the move – eat, drink, read, communicate, even get married and take degree courses, so I suppose this eventuality shouldn’t surprise me. The thought that I may be forced into this same peripatetic mode appalls me.
No more sitting quietly at my office desk, contemplating the blank screen of my word processor. No more losing myself doing research on my browser, or writing a carefully composed email, or creating digital art. I read recently that a Chinese woman had written a five-hundred-page novel by texting on her cell phone while commuting back and forth to work! Well, I’m not Chinese or female. I am an old, self-taught typist, with big fingers. My typing style could be described as hit and miss, so my chances of creating anything worthwhile on the miniscule keyboards of these hand-held gizmos is practically nil.
When people like me express such concerns, the Industry’s response is that pretty soon it will not be necessary to type, once speech recognition software is perfected. Well, I have news for them; my diction is so bad I have reduced typists to tears, back in the days of dictation machines.
# # #
