Friday, September 16, 2011

I Don't Have An iPhone, Now I Can't Communicate

A few months ago my mother asked me “if you save a file on a USB key that already has another file on it do you ‘tape over’ the first one?”

My family has never been particularly ahead of the game when it comes to technology.  We are all hopelessly nostalgic.  Case in point: We had a rotary phone in the kitchen until 2008 that was not just for cute ironic decorative purposes.  We would still have it except that it came to our attention we were actually paying a monthly fee to ‘rent’ it.  After calculating that monthly fee over the course of, let’s see, three decades, we discovered that maybe $5,500 was a little more than we were willing to spend on a device so primitive you couldn’t even press 1 at any time to speak to an operator.  Also we were told by the phone company we had to return it, which may have been the greatest experience of my life because really, just imagine returning an f’ing rotary phone in 2008.  We were giving back merchandise that went out of style before the sales clerk’s parents were even born!  Luckily he just stared it like one of the apes with the monolith at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, then laughed at us and told us we could keep it.  Thank-you Brad!

When everyone got MySpace I was happily handwriting letters to my friends.  When I finally got hip to Facebook everyone was Tweeting and Tumbling.    When all my friends got their wiis and started raving about how awesome DDR was, I was just confused about why the sudden mass enthusiasm for Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration. (Not joking!)  In my defense I was on the home stretch of a degree heavily influenced by conflict and security studies at the time, so my capacity for acronyms had already been pushed well beyond the legal limit.  But still!

With so much stuff around it’s hard to know what is necessary and whether it’s worth investing time and money into.  Do I really need to get a Twitter account and then go wait in line for six days for the latest smart phone?  How many apps should I have?  As someone who has always lagged about as far as one can from the cutting edge without converting to Amish, I have experienced a few problems by not upgrading.  Here are some of the setbacks to being set back.
1.      It’s harder to stay competitive in the job market.  If employers require someone with advanced knowledge of Excel and you think that Microsoft is a kind of laundry detergent, you’re the one with the problem not them.  It doesn’t matter that your typewriter has made you incredibly fast and accurate, you’re still not getting the job.
2.      Everyone else can do things way faster than you.  By the time you finish looking through the library’s rolodex (if they actually have one) your competitor has already Googled their way to the finish line and is now selling their How To Succeed guide on E-Bay and Amazon.  Or people are just reading it on their sleek kindles.
3.      You limit your resources.  The internet provides an infinite supply of buyers for whatever you’re selling or sellers for whatever you’re buying.  If you have a business without a website, you pretty much don’t exist.  If you have any kind of interest in anything at all, you can find the connections you need to excel at it or at least find other people who share that interest.  Sometimes you can even make arrangements to meet them and it’s fun!
4.      You are more confused by people and less amused by their jokes.  There is a reason uproarious laughter breaks out at the phrase “leave Britney alone!”  Why not laugh with them?  If cinema is the big screen, and television is the small screen, Youtube is maybe the dump screen.  Sure it’s full of trash, but sometimes there’s a gem. 

So spoil yourself with at least a few of the latest gadgets and trends.  Surf the web.  It’s okay if you have no idea why double rainbows are so hilarious, or have never seen a sneezing panda or evil gopher.  It’s maybe even okay if you only have MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Messenger, a website, six e-mail addresses and a Blog, but draw the line at Tumblr.  There are only so many ways to say the same thing to the same people, right?  But what happens if your friend is choking on something and you have to use her phone to call an ambulance and you can’t figure out how to set the phone to phone?  She just dies right in front of you because you love your damn rotary too much.  How’s that going to feel?

Moral of the story: Sometimes it’s okay to get new stuff, or at the very least, replace old stuff.

A few final words of wisdom for keeping on top of things:
1.      You should not own the film Avatar on VHS or Beta. 
2.      Ataris are nerd chic and therefore cool in a way, but there have been developments in gaming since Frogger. 
3.      The @ and # keys on your computer are not just for censoring swear words anymore.
4.      ISPs are not a kind of birth control.  Floppy discs very well could be.
5.      DDR stands for Dance Dance Revolution, and the United Nations does not offer courses on it (that I’m aware of).  They do offer courses on Disarmament Demobilization and Reintegration though.  I’m on the Honour Roll :)

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