From 103 years ago, titled “When we all have pocket telephones.”
A 103 year old cartoon depicted the world as it might be if telephones were everywhere.
Chester Gould, the artist who created the comic book detective Dick Tracy, envisioned the watch/phone/computer decades ago.
In the mid 1980s I was riding with Terry Lindley, a friend who had a car phone, when I asked to use it to call Jadyne. “Jay,” I said, “I’m calling you from Terry Lindley’s car. He has a phone in it!” Amazing stuff. Now this, quality family time.
At first it was a generation thing—the young text, the older ones read newspapers. Now the Boomers probably use them more than Millennials.
If they’re both listening to music in stereo, then who gets just the drums, who gets the lead???
Without our phones how could we get through the day? What would we do while we’re waiting by ourselves, or in line to buy groceries?
Phones help us escape the annoyances of daily life…
…and calm our busy minds.
Cell phones are merely a step along the way. The future will be made up of portable, connected wearable devices. Earrings that double as phones and sunglasses that allow you to surf the web are in the pipeline. The disruption that this kind of immersion will make into the techno-bubble may be unknown now, but not impossible to predict. Boomers like me, who feel lost without our phones, nevertheless look with some trepidation to the future. Airlines are considering allowing passengers to make calls in flight. Thank-you notes are old school. Text is how we communicate. Even emails are so over.
Such a thing as cell phone etiquette falls by the wayside. Mothers walking with their children, checking texts, people engaged in real life person-to-person conversations pause just to check their phones. Couples waiting for food to be served at restaurants prefer their phones to each other, often send a “really important text” before picking up chopsticks, while their Pho steams away.
A psychiatrist, Jon Goldin, had this to say five years ago about children and cell phones. “I’ve used this analogy before, but if I don’t have a pool in my backyard, no one can drown in it. In the same way, if my son doesn’t have social media, he cannot be bullied, humiliated, and belittled on social media. He can’t be obsessed with likes, comments, etc. He can’t feel less than because everyone else’s highlight reels look so fantastic.”
I don’t envy parents who are facing these issues. When presented with such questions, my father, a technophobe, always asked the same question, “How does it bring people together?” That was his bottom line. And should be ours, too.
And a warning embedded in an email. The teacher asked the students to list a wish. This was from the teacher’s child.
