This is the Life

I wonder how many of us sit back and reflect on how technology is changing our lives. Quite often we refer to its impact on the world, forgetting that the world is not something over there. We are a part of it. Let me be more specific, my focus is on what is called information communication technology. This is part of what we recognize as the Information Age or the Information Revolution or Digital Revolution. The fact is that communication technology impact on everything. Privacy no longer exists.{{more}} Even we are turning into different beings. Some years ago things which we would have kept private or even sacred we now have no compunction about putting it on Facebook. So we know what you eat, what you wear, what you like, who you hang out with, who you are in love with. Privacy no longer exists.

It is as if the technology has taken hold of us and imprisoned us or made us addicts. How many of us while driving to work on realising that we have forgotten our phones turn back even if it takes away a half an hour from what we had originally set out to do. I have looked at some figures for 2012 (Index Mundi) that indicate that SVG had then 135, 500 mobile cellular telephone subscribers. Not bad for a country with an estimated population of 103, 200! The thought of being without our phones drives us totally crazy.

Just as crazy are the telephone companies that provide the services. They make you feel guilty for not phoning more often. As for being without a cellular phone that is a No! No! for you will be classified as being a product of the Dark Ages. And maybe you are! They even encourage you to cheat on your partner providing you are able to recognize his/her voice. Otherwise you can speak as long as you want to that secret friend. If your partner who is away discovers it, you have enough time to explain it away.

Money is no problem. The companies make it easy for you. This is the lesson I got from one of their ads.

There are persons who have phones almost permanently fixed to their ears, seemingly lost in conversation. I often wonder what they have to say or if in fact they are saying anything. Did the Digital Age provide more things for you to say or simply provides opportunities to say what you always wanted to say but for some reason did not. Of course emails help but they are not as personal as hearing that special voice. In all of this, what gets you totally mad is when you have to speak to machines. “If you know your partner’s extension phone it now”. Inevitably you don’t so they carry you through a lot of departments/sections with their extensions and you can never be sure which one could get you to the person you want to speak to.

But there is more, you get on to a menu that first tells you that your call is monitored for quality purposes. Was never sure what this meant! Even if you get to an extension that you believe might be the correct one, you are given another menu indicating what you had been told before. Eventually when a voice finally answers you become so totally frustrated that you forget who you wanted to speak to and what you wanted to say.

After all of this you decide to drive to the office, being tired dealing with machines that often operate like morons. Then you cannot find parking space for all businesses now think they have a right to mark out the space in front of their business places as ‘no parking zones’ except for themselves. You have had enough so you go home and decide to turn on the television. It might be time to look at the news, but hell there is more advertisement than actual news. If you decide you want to be tortured the advertisements will do that. No wonder someone described advertising as “the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”

One method I found of relieving that kind of stress was to take a drive to the country. This no longer makes sense. I complained to a friend about the energy it took to avoid the potholes. I told him further that you had to decide which pothole you wanted to go into because to move from one was to move to another. He laughed and suggested to me that at least I had gotten a PHD. I didn’t understand what he meant until he informed me that I had become a qualified Pot Hole Dodger. I admitted that he had a point.

In all of this we have to thank the telephone companies for enriching our language. The most common expression or is it term, or whatever it is, is ‘Topping Up’. I checked my Oxford dictionary to see what they had to say about it and realised that they were behind the times.

Although I raised the issue of always seeing some people with cell phones attached to their ears our favourite instrument has actually been inhibiting conversation. How many times have you seen friends on a date and realise that instead of talking to each other the attraction is with the phone! The same thing applies to friends in public places, like a bar or restaurant.

And so it goes my friend. Can anyone be so foolish to speak about the Good Old Days? You got to be kidding!

Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian.