Technology and me

I haven't blogged for a few days and it was almost as if something was missing although I couldn't tell exactly what it was until I started typing this post. Nobody told me blogging is addictive, or that there are withdrawal symptoms. Anyway now that I know I'll try to keep up with the posts.

I was thinking about a news report I saw on television sometime ago, about how some weird people were queueing in front of a store somewhere in London where Apple's iPhone was to be launched the next day. I mean this live report was sometime in the late evening on a cold windy night, when every sane person ought to have been sitting snugly on a sofa in front of the TV, or at least making their way home in order to do so. And there was this throng of wild haired men and women proudly announcing to the TV reporter that they were happy to brave the foul weather all night, just to be sure that they obtained the iPhone the very minute it became available in the UK the next morning when the store's doors opened. Thinking about this I wondered what was so special about the iPhone that was to be sold on the first day. Was it perhaps different in some enhanced way to any other iPhones that would be sold the day after? What about those who would acquire the iPhone weeks or even months after its launch? Taking into account the pace of technology, perhaps its even sensible to wait a few weeks I thought to myself.

I am fascinated by technology and the advances that we have witnessed within just a few decades. It's nothing short of amazing. But having said that, I personally have struggled to keep up with innovations, although when I do finally catch up, I've often wondered why I was so slow in realising how truly awesome this thing is, whatever it was that I was just catching up with. Let's start with mobile phones, or cell phones as some people say. For a long while I was entirely convinced that I did not need a mobile phone. What for? I would question myself. I already had a phone at home and another at work. Surely I didn't need a third phone? Who would want to contact me anyway when I was out and about? But when I looked around and saw that even school children carried mobile telephonic devices around, texting and the like, I started to feel like a visitor from another planet, or from a place in time somewhere in the past. Not until then did I realise how ancient my thinking must have seemed to those to whom I fervently argued that a mobile telephone was a completely unnecessary frivolity. Anyway, as I have often had to do, I caved in and acquired one.

It was pretty much the same with the Internet. Even this blog was started five years after everyone I know had already started a blog. As a child sitting in the back seat of my parents' car, anytime the car stopped at a railway crossing, or whenever there was the possibility that we would be anywhere near a passing train, I clearly remember the panic that would take hold of me and how I would try to duck down under the driver's seat until the train passed. I feared engines and machines or anything mechanical. I seem to not have outgrown this anxiety about machines and technological innovations generally. I despise pocket calculators, but I have to use one regardless. Thankfully today's computers are user-friendly, but apart from the basic word-processing, emails, blogging (now), music and videos, there isn't very much else that I do with them. I like to draw with crayons and paint pictures with a brush. I love to read books that are made of paper and cardboard. I love writing with a pen and ink. Sitting in front of this computer screen is a necessary evil, the way I see it. I looked up the word "technophobia" in the dictionary and was surprised to find that it's a real word, defined as the "fear of or aversion to technology, especially computers and high technology". That finger is pointing directly at me. 

Yes I accept, I am officially a technophobe, because now Twitter is all the rage and I am breaking out in a cold sweat.

I know I've been rambling in this post, but I just needed to let that out somehow. It's even had a therapeutic effect in that I've been able to share with this blog something that has lurked somewhere at the back of my mind for a long time about which I'd not been able to speak to anyone. But of course, I still haven't acquired that Apple iPhone, although I might just do so someday.

PS: I set up my Twitter account shortly afterwards.