Oh technology, so convenient yet so dangerous. Technology has made it easier to hold onto the past. We save numbers in our phones, can find a person by a click of a Google search,and see what someone is up to through their Facebook page without them even knowing. Our greatest invention of the last decade has been the iPod...and iPad...and iPhone. A convenience not a necessity. What happened to the days of inventing such things as electricity, the telephone and the automobile, the space shuttle? These things made our lives easier but also were somewhat of a necessity and advanced us as a civilization. Yes, you CAN do without all these things but they make a lot of every day tasks easier. What does the iPod do? Other than provide you with music. We don't NEED these new things, we WANT these things.
Our society loves things that make life easier. And one thing these new technologies provide, is a way to hold on tight to the past--to keep it in our pockets at all times. Before, we used to have to memorize someones phone number. And then we would have to actually call them. And, if we didn't have something worthwhile to say, breathing into the receiver was probably not the best idea. If we wanted to find out about an ex, we would have to actually find and ask mutual friends. But now, our phones and facebook does all this for us.
We get to hold on to the past and keep things and people at our beck and call just in case we need them. Just like we don't have to settle because there's always something shiny and new around the corner, we also don't have to let go because we have extra external memory space to hold all our past remembrances.
I received a text this week from a number I didn't have saved in my phone. Just someone asking me how I was. I asked them who they were since the number wasn't saved. He said David. Now, I wracked my brain trying to figure out what David since I usually don't give out my number to random people without having their number as well. So I asked him how we know each other. He responded with "I don't know". Now, here's the problem: he found my number in his phone and decided to text me without knowing how he knows me with hopes that I would tell him. Mistake number 1. Mistake number 2 was telling me that he doesn't know. Because now, it's obvious that he has probably run out of vaginas and thought Natasha looked exotic in his phone and decided to give it a whirl. I was 99% sure I knew what David he was, but I wasn't going to give into his schemes. So I called him out on it and questioned why he thought it was a good idea to text some number in his phone when he didn't actually know how he knew that person. He answered with an embarrassed apology and that was that.
Now, I kind of felt bad. Because he wasn't a bad guy, he had just fallen victim to typical societal lack of thinking before acting. It wasn't his fault, we all do it. We all hang onto things we shouldn't or have things that are of no use to us. My number was of no use to him for a year. Why was it to be used now? Because of the convenience having it offers.
I have always said that when this planet does implode (and it will), our species is ill equipped to survive any sort of catastrophic disaster. Once electricity, phones, Internet, and microwaves cease to operate, we will be sitting around looking at each other and cursing that we cannot Google how to properly build a fire.
Until that day comes though, we will just have to do with the every day disasters of random texts, drunk dials to exes of 10 years past and having to rely on the Internet to tell us what and how to do things at all times.
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