A Non-Smartphone

Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?

My smartphone is almost permanently attached to my left hand, while my right hand scrolls, searches, and plays useless games. I really wish the smartphone had never been invented.

For one thing nowadays, technology is intrusive, and leaks like a sieve. Sharing information about you to any nosy company who decides to collect it.

AI is great but I don’t need an offer that it will write everything for me, every day. Popping up at the bottom of the screen with offers of help for things I can do myself.

I wish we could go back to connecting with real people, talking on the phone not texting. Going out and having fun with friends.

I started to get fed up with social media a couple of years ago. Saturated by promotional posts, couldn’t see my friends, getting caught up in discussions trying to be the voice of reason, and quite often truth. Being insulted by pathetic men who can’t discuss.

Get in the bin you woke idiot was one that sticks in my mind. All because I said quite truthfully that you don’t get an honour from the King in the UK unless you’ve done a lot more than be famous or play sport. There is always a charity angle.

Well unless you’re a politician, then you do get something that puzzles many of us, but in truth public service is brutal so they probably deserve it just for withstanding the trolling, and at least trying to help their country.

I walked away from social media when I received my diagnosis. I knew that I had to take as much stress out of my life as I could. I’d got to the point I couldn’t take the poison anyway.

Any reach I once had, had completely collapsed under the weight of advertisers. If I posted a blog my stats collapsed and my views were nil. In fairness it did take money from billionnaires doing that as I didn’t have to pay.

I had over 2.5k ‘friends’ on there. A handful were friends that I knew. Can you guess how many people made contact to find out where I’d gone? Including actual, so-called friends on there? Three.

Technology can made you feel even less popular and more isolated.

Perhaps for the younger generation it would be different as this is the way they’ve always communicated, but it put things in perspective for me.

My basic conclusion is that technology companies are trying to make their products indispensable, to become our master not a tool for our use controlled by us. AI particularly is creating a dependency.

I visualise a few years into the future, technology has collapsed! Been decimated in a cyber attack. There are school exams coming up.

Teachers have been frantically calling their grandparents asking them if they have any paper for writing on and any of those pen thingies.

The kids are faced with various notebooks and antique pens still mercifully working. They sit there.

“Miss! What is this pen thing and how do I make it work?

I think you take the lid thing off…other end dear.

Now what do I do miss?

You write down your answers, the questions are on the white board. I think most of my smelling is pritty goodish.

Miss!

Yes Tommy?

What’s write?”

I see a future of dependency that if tech is removed it will be more than infrastructure that collapses.

How lonely will you be when all your main connections are spread around the world, and you have no idea who your neighbours are? You were always either indoors on a computer, or sitting using a smartphone when out with friends.

No, my smartphone is my bugbear, but with a few excellent exceptions, such as the difference tech has made to science and medicine, I wish I’d never heard of it. Or at least only basic tech. Typing on a computer is much better with spell check, and the ability to print out your documents.

What?! You don’t print anything out anymore? It’s all email?

Sigh

Best love

Amorah – Deb