No, this is not going to be a rant on phone usage on the road. We all know about that stupidity! How could we not? We are reminded every day.

I want to take a moment to think about the Smartphone as a device. We have obviously heralded it as the single thing we cannot seem to live without. So much so that some recent polls I read said people would rather give up their partner than give up their phone.

Now, I was an early adopter of the cellular phone (yes, I had one of the brick/bag phones), of the PDA and the digital camera.

Is it convenient having all three in one handy package? Sure!

But these things have come to rule our lives. We no longer have a moment of peace. I thought having to wear a pager was bad! At least it provided me a short gap between being notified I was needed and being actively involved in whatever I was being paged for. A moment to finish what I was doing, finish my thought, finish my lunch.

Not now. People expect immediate responses to text, calls, emails; because all three are right there, beaconing to be responded to, and everyone knows it!

MTTR – Mean Time To Respond, is a commonly used term in the service world I live in. The problem is MTTR in my personal life has begun to be tracked and I am critiqued on as well.

This is one of the greatest things about being a motorcyclist. My time on the bike is truly my own. I am “unavailable”, unable to respond to text, calls or email.

And I love it!

The old idea of “take time and smell the roses” has become, “I’ll Google some rose pic’s and imagine the smell”.

To what end? More, better, faster?

Is any of this helping us be better? You may say it helps us be more or faster, but I would counter that with it is making us “more quickly distracted”.

We have become a society of snipits. No lengthy articles, heaven forgive books, we need sound bites! The shorter the better.

Our ability to focus is now on par with a Goldfish (that’s 6 seconds for any who do not know).

Thus, we have driven ourselves almost insane with our incessant need for immediacy. And go ahead and try to pin this on today’s youth, but they are a byproduct of our own desires for more, faster, Faster, FASter, FASTER!

I have said before, two things have ruined us; The Starbucks experience and Apple Apps. What I mean by this is Starbucks taught us that coffee cost $5 buck, not 50 cents and technology cost 99 cents. Thee are the new gospel.

Have these things made our lives better…to me the jury is out on this. Do I necessarily need anything other than my phone to be productive? Yes, I need people. No matter how productive all this mobile technology makes us, we need others.

We were not meant to be alone and cloistered behind an electronic wall. Our lives were meant to be lived in the present, not on a pane of glass.

Recently I have read a number of articles from people taking an electronic sabbatical. Leaving technology behind for a weekend or a week and rediscovering themselves and others. Each of these articles are peppered with the many freeing aspects these “breaks” from the electronic world provide.

So, so I really think the Smartphone is the dumbest invention ever?

Yes, yes I do.