A few months back, following the announcement of the new Amazon Kindle, I wrote a post highlighting the pros and cons of using e-book readers over your more traditional paper book here.
I’ve since purchased a Kindle – and – needless to say, I love it.
The moment that prompted this post happened after only a couple of days of using the device.
I was reading through my digital copy of David Nicholls’s One Day when I suddenly found myself trying to pull down the right corner of the Kindle to turn the page. “What a laugh” I thought. “I must write this down”.
Soon after writing it down I had several people coming back to me saying similar experiences had happened to them. The funniest of which came from a follower on Twitter who claimed to have caught herself doing the iPhone finger starfish to enlarge a paper map.
Iranian comedienne Shappi Khorsandi dedicates part of her current act to the love and adoration her husband gives to his iPhone, joking that he once tried to do the finger starfish to her face as a sign of affection.
Have the lines between old and new, between technology and the real world really become this blurred?
Mobile Phones, Keeping You Appy
Part of our lives that has been influenced the most by technology is our reliance on mobile phones – a reliance that, more and more, has nothing to do with the device’s ability to make phone calls at all.
Apple started it. They often do.
The iPhone has been a huge commercial success worldwide - a success that could arguably be down to Apps.
Apps (short for Applications) work to turn your phone into anything it wants to be.
Think of something ridiculous. Chances are, it’s been thought of before – and made into an App.
GPS was the obvious one. Never again will you have to deal with that pesky task of having to go up to a stranger and ask them for directions. Horrible, too much human contact. Now you can ignore all others around you as you navigate yourself from one street to the next using a computer IN SPACE to guide you along your way.
There are absolutely too many to go into, I wouldn’t even touch the surface, but to name a few concepts, you can:
- Point your mobile’s camera at a street and it will overlay the camera view with the names and contents of each shop/cafe.
- Use your mobile’s inbuilt GPS to “Check out Singles in your area”. Or to put it bluntly, “Within grabbing distance”.
- Order a pint of milk on your way home, and have it delivered to you by the time you get in.
Social Networks: All You Need To Know (in 250 words or less)
It would be difficult to write about how technology is influencing our everyday lives without mentioning social networks.
The main players have changed over the last few years, though social networking in one form or another has been alive and well online since 1995 with the birth of Classmates.com, followed by Six Degrees of Separation in 1997, Circle of Friends in 1999, Friendster in 2002, Myspace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004.
In 2007, when the social networking battle was in full swing, a friend of mine had the following quote pasted to the bottom of her Myspace profile -
“Mark would totally kick Tom’s ass if ever a fight ensued, even though social conditioning has seen to it that I never have the guts to delete this thing”
This summed up social networking sites influence on the real world at this time, and the so-called politics behind it very well. Here ‘Mark’ refers to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and ‘Tom’ refers to Tom Anderson, the founder of Myspace. The ‘fight’ is a metaphorical fight depicting her opinion of the quality of both sites.
Three years on and Facebook is the clear ruler of the social network kingdom, with over 500 million active users, 50% of which log in every day, and over 700 billion minutes being spent on Facebook each month.
The Result
The result of these changes, these blurred lines between old and new, technology and reality, and our former perceptions and what we are now being made to believe is one of intergration.
It’s not a case of all or nothing.
YOU choose your level of integration with these new technologies. Use them how you wish to, as and when you wish to.
I know many people, for example, who are against E-Books of any sort.
They look down on my Kindle reading activities, and tell themselves they will never go the same way themselves. That may well be the case (though I’m sure many sceptics will move across soon enough) but it’s not a case of one or the other.
I’ve bought physical books since owning an e-book reader – many practical business books, for example, I would have trouble reading on a Kindle due to my constantly yearning to highlight it within an inch of it’s life.
Let technology in and keep it out in whatever proportions you wish. It’s all a matter of choice. Technology may well be influencing our lives more than ever before, but it cannot influence our habits without our say so.
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