I am the generation of the technology boom. We wait for nothing. Instantaneous describes most succinctly my life. Even that word is too long too type. I trip over it. I could send a message to America in the same time it takes to pronounce that word. So, I’ll shorten it. Instant. Ever since the time that technology has become prevalent, I have grown accustomed to instant acquisition. Yet still, I am old enough to remember the time before. I remember still the flip phone. I remember the rise and fall of Blackberry, and I remember when Internet Explorer was the leading browser. I remember when people feared oversharing information and when the term stranger included anyone you had not yet met in person.
Perhaps when I am old, I will relay to my grandchildren the horrors of the 21st century version of the stone age. I will tell them of the brick phone. I will tell them of dial up internet and satellite dishes. I will tell them of cars that ran only on gas and of basic cable. I will tell them of the isolation of a world that didn’t have an everpresent, ethereal link between every person you spoke to on the daily basis.
Friday the 11, I was pickpocketed. I lost my phone (which also is a camera as well as a computer as well as a calculator). In a moment where I was not vigilant, someone slipped from my pocket my ethereal tether to every other person in my life. This 200 ounce device composed a network that spread all across the globe, from Taiwan to Spain to China to America. The people composing that network all held varying levels of relevance to my daily life, but still were included in my daily affairs, whether that be through an image posted on social media or a message sent in an idle moment. Meanwhile, I knew of everything happening with them. All of these unobtrusive intrusions on my daily activities feel largely innocuous. They amount to perhaps a missed observation here or an ignored conversation there. Small moments were sacrificed for correspondence with another part of my life, with the friend who also is in class but across the city or perhaps with the internet chat of kids who all have never met but have a keen affinity for Sylvia Plath. Our phones make our worlds a little bigger, as no longer are we confined to any one situation or moment. There always is the opportunity to momentarily opt out.
When my phone was stolen, suddenly that option no longer was there for me. Returned to my possession were all those moments lost to a message or what felt like a vital update on the happenings of the world an ocean away. My phone had kept me in a sort of limbo, as never was I truly absent from home, even if physically I was elsewhere. Checking my phone had become as habitual as looking both ways before crossing the street, and when it suddenly no longer was there, there was a notable void but also a liberation. Though the phone gives the privelage of choice, it also adds a certain demand. There is the option to share every moment. There is as well the expectation that at any given moment you will be accessible, that you will have no objections to withdrawing from your immediate surroundings for a stroll in the simultaneous happenings of far away. Without my phone comes a new choice. It is deliberateness. If I speak to home, it is because I have created a space to do so. I have brought out my computer, found myself a location with wifi, and decided to partake in the company of those I love and miss. This time is not robbed from the world around me, but instead is a deliberate reprieve. This time becomes a haven, welcoming but not insistent. In the place of my smart phone I now have a $25 pre-pay with a 2 megapixel quality camera. It as well has a calculator and is a radio, but on it I cannot call home. In some of my free moments, here’s Rennes as it prepares for Christmas from this phone’s perspective and from the perspective of a girl who has opened her eyes a little wider.
Perhaps when I am old, I will relay to my grandchildren the horrors of the 21st century version of the stone age. I will tell them of the brick phone. I will tell them of dial up internet and satellite dishes. I will tell them of cars that ran only on gas and of basic cable. I will tell them of the isolation of a world that didn’t have an everpresent, ethereal link between every person you spoke to on the daily basis.
Friday the 11, I was pickpocketed. I lost my phone (which also is a camera as well as a computer as well as a calculator). In a moment where I was not vigilant, someone slipped from my pocket my ethereal tether to every other person in my life. This 200 ounce device composed a network that spread all across the globe, from Taiwan to Spain to China to America. The people composing that network all held varying levels of relevance to my daily life, but still were included in my daily affairs, whether that be through an image posted on social media or a message sent in an idle moment. Meanwhile, I knew of everything happening with them. All of these unobtrusive intrusions on my daily activities feel largely innocuous. They amount to perhaps a missed observation here or an ignored conversation there. Small moments were sacrificed for correspondence with another part of my life, with the friend who also is in class but across the city or perhaps with the internet chat of kids who all have never met but have a keen affinity for Sylvia Plath. Our phones make our worlds a little bigger, as no longer are we confined to any one situation or moment. There always is the opportunity to momentarily opt out.
When my phone was stolen, suddenly that option no longer was there for me. Returned to my possession were all those moments lost to a message or what felt like a vital update on the happenings of the world an ocean away. My phone had kept me in a sort of limbo, as never was I truly absent from home, even if physically I was elsewhere. Checking my phone had become as habitual as looking both ways before crossing the street, and when it suddenly no longer was there, there was a notable void but also a liberation. Though the phone gives the privelage of choice, it also adds a certain demand. There is the option to share every moment. There is as well the expectation that at any given moment you will be accessible, that you will have no objections to withdrawing from your immediate surroundings for a stroll in the simultaneous happenings of far away. Without my phone comes a new choice. It is deliberateness. If I speak to home, it is because I have created a space to do so. I have brought out my computer, found myself a location with wifi, and decided to partake in the company of those I love and miss. This time is not robbed from the world around me, but instead is a deliberate reprieve. This time becomes a haven, welcoming but not insistent. In the place of my smart phone I now have a $25 pre-pay with a 2 megapixel quality camera. It as well has a calculator and is a radio, but on it I cannot call home. In some of my free moments, here’s Rennes as it prepares for Christmas from this phone’s perspective and from the perspective of a girl who has opened her eyes a little wider.