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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Is it convenient having all three in one handy package? Sure!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
MTTR \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
This is one of the greatest things about being a motorcyclist. My time on the bike is truly my own. I am \u201cunavailable\u201d, unable to respond to text, calls or email.<\/p>\n
And I love it!<\/p>\n
The old idea of \u201ctake time and smell the roses\u201d has become, \u201cI\u2019ll Google some rose pic\u2019s and imagine the smell\u201d.<\/p>\n
To what end? More, better, faster?<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmore quickly distracted\u201d.<\/p>\n
We have become a society of snipits. No lengthy articles, heaven forgive books, we need sound bites! The shorter the better.<\/p>\n
Our ability to focus is now on par with a Goldfish (that’s 6 seconds for any who do not know).<\/p>\n
Thus, we have driven ourselves almost insane with our incessant need for immediacy. And go ahead and try to pin this on today\u2019s youth, but they are a byproduct of our own desires for more, faster, Faster, FASter, FASTER!<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Have these things made our lives better\u2026to 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbreaks\u201d from the electronic world provide.<\/p>\n
So, so I really think the Smartphone is the dumbest invention ever?<\/p>\n
Yes, yes I do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mind"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xplorechrist.com\/norightgear\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}