"I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT MY PHONE!!"

Hi guys!

So yesterday I was riding in the car on my way to a Christmas party and my friend who was driving was telling me about how the last time she used her GPS it took her down a road that the GPS probably thought would connect to her final destination but in actuality it didn't. Once she realized this, she had no idea what to do. Which is understandable seeing as she was driving in the dark in an area that she didn't know. Obviously if the GPS couldn't guide her to her final destination, she didn't want to trust it to get her on the right track. Luckily for her, she called some her friends who were trying to get to the same house and she eventually found her way. But this got me thinking: how in the world did we get so reliant on technology that we can't even get from destination 1 to destination 2 without a GPS? Granted my friend had never been to that house before but what happened to the days where people would sail the globe by looking at the coastline and the stars.

Now I'm not much better then my friend because just 15 minutes ago, my phone wasn't responding, like the screen was black and no buttons I pushed did anything. I had been FaceTiming with a friend (clue to the type of phone I have) and he had to go. So since he called me, my phone automatically shuts the screen off just like all iPhone's do. Then I had to text one of my friends but when I pressed the home button nothing happened. Now the home button had been a little glitchy lately and so I just tried the sleep/wake button, but nothing happened again. Now that got me worried. I plugged the phone in to see if the battery had died without me knowing and still nothing. Then I got to thinking, what would I do for the next couple of days? The college I go to does not have an Apple Store nearby to help me out and so I thought that I would be stuck phoneless for the next 2 weeks until I could go home to my local Apple Store. That of course freaked me out even more. I basically thought I couldn't live with my phone. My friends tell me when we're meeting for dinner via text, I call my parents to let them know what's going on in my life, my phone is my alarm clock, and I probably couldn't make it to class on time without my phone because I don't wear a watch and college doesn't really have clocks everywhere you look.

Obviously this is a problem. Just 5 years ago I didn't have a cell phone at all, much less an iPhone. I seemed fine then without that piece of technology but now it appears that I wouldn't be able to function without it. How crazy is it, that my life depends on this tiny rectangular piece of steel and glass that while is amazingly smart and essentially a mini computer, it still does not pump the blood in my body or allow me to think and type this very post?

Now I don't really have any genius ideas as to how we can fix this problem and I don't expect our world to get taken over by crazy robots who are mad at how we abuse our devices but with things like Watson, Siri, and other artificial intelligence type programs we could get so reliant that we stop thinking and doing things for ourselves. During Thanksgiving break I was watching Wall-E. While the movie mainly satirizes how we should recycle more or our planet is going to be covered with our trash that we won't be able to live on Earth anymore, it still touched on how humans sit around and let technology do things for us. Machines cleaned us, changed our clothes, fed us, and the only way we had contact with another person was through a screen in front of our faces. That's ridiculous and of course we don't have the technology right now to do things like that for us but who's to say that later down the road that technology won't get invented. I guess my take home message for this post is, be careful with how much you depend on the technology around you.

Bye!

P.S. I had wanted to write a post touching on this subject but hadn't been planning to until after exams were over. I guess its just a big coincidence that my phone has to freak out on me today especially since I heard that story from my friend yesterday. Oh and if your iPhone mysteriously stops responding also, try pressing both the sleep/wake button and the home button at the same time until you see the Apple logo appear.