Are We Absurdly Wired as a People?
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Technology
Allow me to set the scene, I was sitting at my usual position in a pew at church this morning. The person speaking at the pulpit was talking about music in the Gospel (the Mormon one) and was at that time mentioning how into Posicore she was. While I was laughing to myself and then explaining to my father, who was sitting next to me, what Posicore is, my Blackberry started vibrating. I ignored it at first, figuring that it was just an email that I could check later.
Unfortunately, it started going again and again. It vibrated to the point when my leg started to feel numb and I just had to know what was going on. I got it out of my pocket to reveal that my friend Nick, whom you may, but probably didn’t, hear on DuoRadio a few times, had been messaging me on AIM. I don’t know why the AIM app was even on, I usually have it set to invisible because I don’t like to IM away from a computer keyboard. Here’s what Nick had to say:
Hey dude, I’m on my new iPod touch now, this is wild.
Wow, what a wonderful world we all live in. Nick was able to send a message on his iPod touch over Wi-Fi from his dorm room at UMaine that went over the Internets to AOL‘s central servers and then back over the Internets to T-Mobile who sent it to me over their wireless network to my Blackberry while I was sitting in Church listening to my friend’s talk about her love for music and Posicore.
Are you freaking kidding me? Is this what we as a society have accomplished? Clearly, finding a cure for AIDS is too complicated and better treatments for Cancer is another 20 or 30 years away. But, sending each other annoying messages over vastly complicated and expensive network infrastructure, well, the future is here everybody! And that’s not all, now when we see someone in an Airport Terminal wearing a messy clown wig and begging passers by for spare change, we don’t have to call all of our friends and tell them about it with our voices. Nope, we can just send them all a picture at the click of a button, unless you have the same phone my Dad has, then good luck.
OK, rant over. By the way, the above links for the Blackberry (Curve 8320) and the iPod touch are to my Amazon Associates account. I wanted to try this out and see if I could make any money at this whole blogging thing without annoying banner ads all over the place that no one would click anyway. Is linking to Amazon in a blog post not acceptable on the Internet? Anyone have any thoughts? If not, then I won’t ever do it again, but you have my word, I only link to products that I have used or owned and can recommend.
