This semester has been particularly hard on my electronics
sparing none of my various devices. The count thus far is a broken phone,
slightly injured camera and a shorted laptop charger. The phone replacement
that I use is a dumb phone which manages to service just the bare minimum
calling duties. This leaves me in a very precarious position since a majority
of the work done recently requires certain applications which are taken for
granted as available on every phone.
On the first day of using the dumb phone in place of my
smart phone, I suffered from a lot of distress which I can only classify as
withdrawal symptoms and had a hard time adjusting to not having a regular
feedback/ communication device and being unable to maintain contact with my
peers on a regular basis, not to forget the lack of games and other
applications.
A few days after I settled down into the new routine and
found replacements for my most necessary smartphone applications on my desktop,
I realized the amount of time freed up by not using a smartphone and the opportunities
it opened up. The lack of a consistent
reminder of pending work in the form of reminders/messages/calls meant I was
far more effective at what I was doing at the moment. The lack of games in my
phone also meant I was less distracted.
While a smartphone might be helpful in organizing a hectic
schedule into manageable chunks, it also is a constant reminder of the work
remaining for the day and is a psychological load.
The biggest problem during these days when I was not using a
smartphone was maintaining contact with someone who does. The users of
smartphones tend to use applications like Whatsapp/Wechat to communicate with
others more effectively but this tends to leave out users of dumbphones. With
no way around, I ended up using an emulator on my desktop to keep in touch with
smartphone users. The parallel worlds of communication need to coalesce into a
single method of communication to avoid further widening of the trench between
dumb and smartphones.
Technological Evolution has left the world trying to sort
itself into the various categories of phone users. The dumbphone user who couldn’t
care more about the progress of technology. The avid smartphone user who uses
every popular application there is. The workhorse who uses the smartphone to
manage their everyday life. The highend phone users who have phones with far
too many features to handle and several other such. This has resulted in
certain trenches being formed in communication where only devices above a
certain barrier can use certain means of communication leaving the others
stranded. While evolution is but a way of life, the evolution of technology should
not be used as another means of erecting barriers between the Morlocks and the
Eloi.
