Fba-chiayi

Do me a favor— reach in your pocket and pull out your phone. Do whatever you need to do to get your camera; touch the screen, hit the correct icon or, if you’re still living in the bronze age, touch the silver button on the side. Take a picture, take a video, maybe add some effects to your little creation, then ask yourself this question: why in the name of God can I do this with my phone?

+Think back to 1876 and imagine you are in the room with Alexander Graham Bell. If you examined his now ancient creation, it wouldn’t even remotely resemble that little piece of electronics that you have on you at all times. His idea of the telephone was simply for the purpose of communication. A better way to relay a message than a telegraph. He was simply attempting to invent something that would make speaking to another human being easier than ever before. And he succeeded.
But in our contemporary society, the phone is so much more than a message relay. It’s part phone, part computer, part camera, part Digital camcorder, part typewriter, part notepad. Our phones are assembled and created with so many components that they no longer resemble the original idea. Now, they’re just amalgamations of every bit of technology we’ve come to love, wrapped into one package for our convenience. If you have the good fortune to own a smart phone, you really are set for life. No longer will you have to do anything for yourself; you won’t have to look at a map, read a book, and you definitely won’t miss an opportunity to bring out your built in camcorder and upload an embarrassing moment to Facebook.

It seems now that communication has become a byproduct of our phone ownership. We no longer buy phones simply so that we can easier speak with our friends and loved ones, but so that we can access our email and read Wikipedia anywhere that we go.This isn’t a bad thing by any means. It is the nature of technology to make our lives easier, but our contemporary phones are emblematic of a bigger cultural questions.

Have we become so dependent on the amenities of technology that we have to build them into our phones? Have the more shallow forms of human interaction replaced the honesty and simplicity of a simple conversation? And if so, what does this mean for future human relation?
I’m not one of those extremist that believes technology will make us unable to empathize with our fellow man, but it does raise a few concerns. I don’t believe that looking through a camcorder at my first child will ever replace the feeling of actually seeing them, but it makes me wonder if I’ll be distracted by my incessant need to play Angry Birds and miss my babies first step. Our phones present us every opportunity to fall complete victim to our materialism.