Unavoidable Technology

Technology is unavoidable. The other day, my boyfriend couldn't find the charger to his cell phone, and you would have thought that the world might come to an end if he didn't find it in time to charge his dying phone. I couldn't help but think to myself how far we have come in the field of technology.

I can still remember having a rotary phone in my parents house when I was growing up. I remember it very clearly because I had been allowed to use it a few times to dial my grandmother's phone number. Her phone number was considered "long distance" which was great for me back then because this meant that it took even longer to dial the number and wait. Nowadays though, if I had to make a phone call like that, I would cringe because of the sheer amount of time I would suspect that it would waste. Now, if I want to make a phone call, I press a button on my phone or say a name out loud, and my phone does the rest in a matter of what sometimes seems like nanoseconds.

Every time you turn on your car, play a cd in a cd player, listen to an mp3 player, write a blog or overhear a plane flying over your head, this means that technology is out there...working. Even the prescription glasses that are sitting on my face right now are evidence enough that technology exists. So, how do you avoid technology? Simple. You don't. Instead, you get used to it; you become acclimated to the surroundings, and eventually, you forget that technology even exists until something doesn't work the way it is supposed to.

The other day, I was trying to watch a movie on Netflix, for example. The movie was supposed to play instantly over an Internet connection. However, for whatever reason, it was not playing properly. Well, after about two to three seconds (tops) of waiting out the frustration, I got up and put in a DVD of my own. I don't blame impatience in this case as much as I blame the fact that technology wasn't working in one area, so I simply switched into a slightly different realm to satisfy my technological needs.

Technology is also at work when you need directions to go somewhere. When I first went away to school to go to college, I had purchased an actual, physical road atlas for driving purposes. Cut to almost a decade later, and almost no one uses road maps anymore because we all have some sort of GPS system to fall back on- whether it is one that we purchased to mount in our vehicles or whether it is some sort of capability that comes with our cell phones (like mine does). Even small things such as carrying cash around is affected by technology. For example, have you ever seen those Visa debit card commercials? Everyone is in line at a store swiping their debit cards and moving along smoothly until someone with cash tries to pay for something and ends up slowing the entire line down. It was both funny but true!