I watched Gods Must be Crazy for the second time some time back. I found it hilarious - I guess I had forgotten most of the movie. As I was watching the movie, it dawned upon me that the iPhone was the coke bottle in my relatively sedate life.
I had subscribed to the mobile phone pretty late in life. But I had to acknowledge that it was useful - now I could sms people when I was going to be late. You see I have never been able to rid myself of this Indian concept of time - which is probably better viewed as a dynamic flow of life in the vein of the "Main Samay Hoon...." prologue that preceded every episode of Mahabharat on Sunday mornings. To bring it down to mere hours and minutes would be profane and worrying about keeping time would almost be vulgar. Anyways, the gist is - I was never punctual. So the mobile phone to me was a boon - I could call the people who were invariably waiting for me, apologise profusely, ask them to commence whatever it is they were doing - all as I was locking up my front door. I could then enjoy the next 45 min of my journey to the destination with relatively less guilt than otherwise.
But the smart phone - ah, the smart phone is indeed my coke bottle. I have come to the conclusion that much like the coke bottle the smart phone seduces one into believing that we need it. But do we really? Perhaps its just the luddite in me - but do we really need to get excited that we can now read our emails on the can? My husband and son huddled together excitedly one evening to wax lyrical about the IOS5 - and they shook their head condescendingly when I failed to get excited over the new noticification centre or when I did not gush like a teenager about the Reminders feature. I eventually did agree that the enhancements made on the IOS5 could prove to be useful - possibly the reminders feature, the changes with camera function, the photo cropping, I guess the newsstand is kind of cute. The point though is that now that I am aware of these things, I feel compelled to use it. Whereas my life was perfectly alright before this without these features.
Take the camera function. Yes, it is so lovely to have a camera handy at any time. Now you can capture all the fantastic moments of your life. So you feel compelled to snap ridiculous moments like baby's first snot pool or my kid in school, playground, living room, kitchen, bathroom, eating, sleeping, nodding, kicking, running, shouting, crying .... I think you catch the drift. And then the pictures of one's lunch, dinner, breakfast. The utter surfeit of photos have totally made good, interesting photos rare. One wonders if every moment of life is captured, would there be any sense of nostalgia in flipping through photographs to run down memory lane. That bitter sweet feeling of a distant memory has got to do equally with the images that are absent as much as the images that have been captured for eternity.
Developments in technology have been fabulous - but for any invention or discovery it is its impact on our lives that would define the significance of the development. Take the invention of the wheel - that had far reaching ramifactions on agriculture, industry, warfare and many more areas (as well as being a contributory factor to the prevailing obesity in our society). Whereas the smart phone gave us Angry Birds. The compressing of both time and space brought about by such smart devices should technically leave us with more time to do things that matter, the so-called "meaningful things". But what do we fill all that time up with? Nonsense mostly. Be it the information overload on television through absolutely unnecessary 24-hr news channels that make a mockery of breaking news through their miniscule minute-by-minute updates or the inane reality shows - there is one, I believe, which takes viewers through 30 rivetting minutes of peoples' disgusting obsessions like eating paper. We talk less, read less, think less - yet feel more overwhelmed by things around us and the pace at which its happening.
So I have decided that just like Xi, I am going to fling my iPhone off the edge of the world - just as soon I as I have figured out where it is with my 'Google Maps for iphone'.
Sent from my iphone.
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