The New Unbilicle

Three weeks ago, my 4-year-old LG phone finally decided that enough was enough it was time to enter cell phone Valhalla.  Over the preceding months the battery took longer and longer to charge, and about the first of May it started turning off on its own.  At first, the turn-offs were widely spaced.  At the end, they came one right after another, even in the middle of a call.

So I finally took the plunge and upgraded to an iPhone 4.  My preference was for a 4s, with double the memory and the ability to have Siri answer my questions, but the difference between 99 cents and 99 dollars won out.

Like a kid at Christmas, I had to play with it immediately.  All the great things of which it was capable, from becoming a compass, or a calculator, a real calendar that was easier to access and program than my old phone, not to mention all the fun and useful apps from geocaching to checking up on the girl's grades at school.  I can even watch live tv!

Over the years I have become much more attached to a cell phone.  I rationalized it was essential in case my car ever decided to quit in the middle of nowhere.   But I am never in the middle of nowhere anymore.  After we dumped the land line in the house, I rationalized that it was the only way someone could reach me in case of an emergency.  But when we only had a landline, yes I do remember those days, of someone was trying to reach me and I could not answer the phone, they had to leave a message on the answering machine or call back.

I thought a lot about this over the weekend.  Twenty years ago, my cell phone was the size of medium sized purse, weighed about the same as a small dog, and did one thing; made calls.  Today my phone can play music, take better pictures than my camera, give me a weather forecast, complete with live doppler radar, tell me how many calories I burned while eating a cheeseburger at a restaurant I found on the phone's internet browser, and do just about anything but wash my car.  I truly need an app for that.

But is there such a thing as too connected?  I attended a seminar at MSU a couple of weeks ago about how technology, especially cell phone technology, has crept into our lives.  I'll come back and edit this when I have time to include some of the interesting parts of the lecture, but to make a long story short, the cell phone has become part of the human existence, a technological umbilical cord that, for some reason, many modern humans have become way too attached.