I’ve had my smart phone – my darling
Droid X – for just about five months now. And I don’t know how I ever lived without it. My calendars are synced, my personal and school email accounts arrive on my phone with a pleasant notification alert, my quest for visiting every Starbucks in Orlando is easier via the built-in GPS, and I have an electronic to-do list that happily taunts me throughout the day.
As I tout my newfound technological expertise and know-it-all aura, my husband views me as more of a technological lemming. Because, let’s face it: I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with
technology. Mostly my loving it and it hating me.
Aside: According to the dictionary.com app that I downloaded on my beloved Droid X, a “lemming” is
a small arctic rodent noted for periodic mass migrations and mass drownings. In my pre-Droid X life, I lived in a world where many minutes were lost sifting through pages of a dictionary or firing up my slug-speed laptop to access the dictionary.com site. But now, friends, I can confirm the definition of my word of choice by pressing one button on my mobile device’s home page.
Aside to the aside: I knew what a lemming was…
I had a point with this entry. Oh right. Social media.
While I argued with myself about the topic before, I’m clearly the epitome of the
Millenial generation: the cell phone-clad kids in their Facebooking and texting glory, the love of constant connection and the social infusion of life onto this 5” x 3” device.
The difference between myself and most Millenials? When sending a text message or conversing via Facebook, I use full sentences, proper punctuation, and appropriate syntax. (And, for the record, I do neither while driving.) Not adhering to simple sentence structure, punctuation rules, and basic grammar is the quickest way to make me “hide” your Facebook commentary. In some extreme cases, I’ve deleted people entirely because they’re offering nothing to the community (
I’ve talked about this topic before), and when I read their posts, I want to smear my red editing pen all over the screen of my phone.
In fact, if you’re one of those people who struggle with forming a sentence before you update your Facebook status (and actually care how you're perceived), you might want to consider “friending” any of the following pages:
Moving on.
I’ve also discovered a slight irritation bubbling up when someone
calls me. My device’s ringtone is fairly foreign; most people know that emailing is the best way to elicit my response. I mean, the
nerve of someone actually
calling my cell phone. (Wait, what? People still use cell phones as phones?) Well, the hell with them – to voicemail they go!
I was a bit shocked at this new internal response, as well as my disregard for the phone’s original use. Of course, there are certain topics and discussions that are better suited for an in-person or over-the-phone conversation. But that differentiation calls for another post entirely. Anyway, I was never a “chatter” in the phone sense, and since the advent of Facebook in ’05, I’ve welcomed the new communication method – and any platforms that make that communication easier.
Enter the smartphone and its assortment of downloadable apps and widgets,
many that are tailored to make our social networking quicker. I’ve been able to whittle down my “Friends” list to a manageable number of updates and commentaries (that I genuinely care about) – all sent to a widget on my phone in real-time, accessed by a simple finger-swipe on the screen. And if my stalker mode is set to extra curious on any given day, the entire “Friends” newsfeed is accessible by touching one additional icon on the screen.
Regarding Facebook and the zillion companies that have created their own
marketing pages, I’ve started evaluating them online just as I would offline. Do they say things that make sense, or do they offer inconsistent advice? More important, do they offer information I’m interested in? And I apply these evaluation questions to people in my “Friends” list as well, particularly those people who I haven’t seen in five years, or talked to in ten.
Anyone remember
McDonald’s slogan and catchy jingle from the early 90s: “What you want is what you get at McDonald’s today”? Having a smartphone is pretty much like that, minus the weight gain and general self-loathing that results from too much fast food.
