When I recently moved into my new apartment I decided to forgo a cell phone, and just get a house phone with my internet. I had installed internet at many points in the past, but uninstalled it because I felt like I just sit on it and use it way too much. If I'm not Googling things, I'm looking on Wikipedia for sources. I had even switched from internet cell phones back to those without internet. After being introduced to the internet and then going without it, that first time I needed directions, or to know what the temperature was, and I didn't have the internet to immediately tell me, I had to get out a paper map and turn on the radio to find out. It was so tedious. I felt lost at sea.
I didn't own a cell phone until 2004. Then this year I had a seriously scary car accident and shook my brains up. The next day I saw a man driving by me holding a box up to his face and talking to it. I laughed at him and thought he was crazy, until I remembered right then that they were called cell phones and had gone into production during my lifetime. I just read online that people are paying top dollar for the old Nokia cell phone that was my first. Back when I had it, it was already so outdated that people laughed at me, now supposedly people are saying they are the greatest cell phone ever and searching for all the old ones to buy them up.
The other day I put some cash on a pre-paid card in order to pay a bill over the phone, the internet bill actually, and after I bought and paid 80$ fore the card, I got it home and it wouldn't work. I called the number and they said I had to go on the VISA website, and give them my name, address, social security number, etc, in order to fight fraud and terrorism. I went to the website and filled it all out in order to help stop the terrorists. When I got to the section asking for a cell phone number, I left it blank. It was rejected, due to the fact it had no cell # listed. I looked over the document and discovered that that field was was required and in order to get the card I already paid for registered so I could actually get the 80$ out of limbo, I was required to have a cell phone number.
When my cable installer put the internet in, with the phone, he commented on how I am the first person he has done an installation for in a long time that doesn't own a television and he seemed to think that was strange. He asked me what I watched and if so how did I watch it. I pointed at my mountains of books and said that if I wanted I could read those, and I pointed to a few stacks of premium DVD's and said that I had every season of Stargate, as well as numerous horror and comedy films so I was set as long as I had a computer. He asked me if I disliked televisions and I said I didnt think I had a problem with them so much as I felt they were unnecessary for me.
In 1999 several friends and myself, we the Anti-Cyber Punks, found a shopping cart on a sidewalk and we rolled it to my house and we put my two televisions in it and then we took the shopping cart to my friends houses and we collected some of their televisions. We tried to collect televisions from random people around the neighborhood we knew, and caught a lot of hell. Then we took the televisions and threw them over a railroad bridge onto the rocks below. The tubes exploded. That was my last television.
When I got a surgery I was in the hospital and I woke up on drugs, they handed me a clicker and I discovered Honey Boo Boo and these guys that chase rattlesnakes in burlap sacks in barns. When I was a kid tele was simple it was Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, cartoons, and we didn't yet have cable. To me a sensational show was 3's Company. We certainly didn't have cable shows centered around the unfortunate lifestyles of the likes of people such as Mama June. I am skeptical of a society that has technology that is so great, but merely uses it to make comedy shows about sad morbidly obese uneducated middle Americans. I don't think people watch those shows for nice reasons. I think those kids are exploited.
Our family had the first Atari when it came out and the first NES, but if you were to hand me a modern game controller I wouldnt know what to do except maybe have a seizure. I still get excited about the old table top Ms. Pac Man game at the peanut bar across the street. I still want to play old fashioned video games.
People seem to be amused when they take my number and I tell them it's a land line, and not to text me. They act amazed. Then I don't get any calls except from the most important callers. That's fine with me. And it's always a mystery as to who is calling, I don't have one of those new fangled caller I.D.'s because people just spoof calls now anyway.
I meet guys and they ask me if I want to text back and forth and I say I have a land line, just call me. " Wait, so we can't send each other sexy pics? " There's nothing less dignified I can think of then a man who assumes I want a picture of his junk right away, and that I am going to send him mine, but apparently, it's one of the initial steps of ritual courtship now. The cell phone junk pic exchange. Having a land line means I spurn that social convention. Spurn baby, spurn. Wouldn't you just like to hang out instead?!
I also sometimes feel discriminated against by people that I know. I don't want to have a big screen tele and a box in my hand poking it all day long, waving my fingers over it like a tool. Several friends have left me out of things merely because invites were sent via text. " I didn't know how to get in touch with you " When having land lines, I have given people my number, but once hearing it's a land line, a lot of people don't even keep it.
I feel like I am left out of the future because I simply do not like some of the downsides of what it has to offer and I do not want to participate in those things because of the costs. For example, the cost to my psyche in the constant barrages of sexist advertisements on the tele. I don't know how to absorb things and filter things out with out somehow being damaged by these things.
I know there are consequences to the choices we make, and I have chosen to be a weird nerd. I am socially unacceptable to most of my generation. I don't have an iPhone to show off, or a cool huge Tele, I don't know how to use Pinterest or Instagram and in a lot of ways I like it that way. I guess I should look at me not having technology as an A-hole limiter, but I feel like technology totally separates people or maybe people separate themselves. This internet and this computer is my life raft to the future, and I use it mostly to talk to other weird nerds. Is that irony?
Anyone else have any thoughts on living with technology and having too much, and living without technology and being left out? What is your relationship with modern day communicative technology, and is that a comfortable relationship for you? How do you think these technologies have affected your life overall? What is your experience?
I didn't own a cell phone until 2004. Then this year I had a seriously scary car accident and shook my brains up. The next day I saw a man driving by me holding a box up to his face and talking to it. I laughed at him and thought he was crazy, until I remembered right then that they were called cell phones and had gone into production during my lifetime. I just read online that people are paying top dollar for the old Nokia cell phone that was my first. Back when I had it, it was already so outdated that people laughed at me, now supposedly people are saying they are the greatest cell phone ever and searching for all the old ones to buy them up.
The other day I put some cash on a pre-paid card in order to pay a bill over the phone, the internet bill actually, and after I bought and paid 80$ fore the card, I got it home and it wouldn't work. I called the number and they said I had to go on the VISA website, and give them my name, address, social security number, etc, in order to fight fraud and terrorism. I went to the website and filled it all out in order to help stop the terrorists. When I got to the section asking for a cell phone number, I left it blank. It was rejected, due to the fact it had no cell # listed. I looked over the document and discovered that that field was was required and in order to get the card I already paid for registered so I could actually get the 80$ out of limbo, I was required to have a cell phone number.
When my cable installer put the internet in, with the phone, he commented on how I am the first person he has done an installation for in a long time that doesn't own a television and he seemed to think that was strange. He asked me what I watched and if so how did I watch it. I pointed at my mountains of books and said that if I wanted I could read those, and I pointed to a few stacks of premium DVD's and said that I had every season of Stargate, as well as numerous horror and comedy films so I was set as long as I had a computer. He asked me if I disliked televisions and I said I didnt think I had a problem with them so much as I felt they were unnecessary for me.
In 1999 several friends and myself, we the Anti-Cyber Punks, found a shopping cart on a sidewalk and we rolled it to my house and we put my two televisions in it and then we took the shopping cart to my friends houses and we collected some of their televisions. We tried to collect televisions from random people around the neighborhood we knew, and caught a lot of hell. Then we took the televisions and threw them over a railroad bridge onto the rocks below. The tubes exploded. That was my last television.
When I got a surgery I was in the hospital and I woke up on drugs, they handed me a clicker and I discovered Honey Boo Boo and these guys that chase rattlesnakes in burlap sacks in barns. When I was a kid tele was simple it was Laverne and Shirley, Happy Days, cartoons, and we didn't yet have cable. To me a sensational show was 3's Company. We certainly didn't have cable shows centered around the unfortunate lifestyles of the likes of people such as Mama June. I am skeptical of a society that has technology that is so great, but merely uses it to make comedy shows about sad morbidly obese uneducated middle Americans. I don't think people watch those shows for nice reasons. I think those kids are exploited.
Our family had the first Atari when it came out and the first NES, but if you were to hand me a modern game controller I wouldnt know what to do except maybe have a seizure. I still get excited about the old table top Ms. Pac Man game at the peanut bar across the street. I still want to play old fashioned video games.
People seem to be amused when they take my number and I tell them it's a land line, and not to text me. They act amazed. Then I don't get any calls except from the most important callers. That's fine with me. And it's always a mystery as to who is calling, I don't have one of those new fangled caller I.D.'s because people just spoof calls now anyway.
I meet guys and they ask me if I want to text back and forth and I say I have a land line, just call me. " Wait, so we can't send each other sexy pics? " There's nothing less dignified I can think of then a man who assumes I want a picture of his junk right away, and that I am going to send him mine, but apparently, it's one of the initial steps of ritual courtship now. The cell phone junk pic exchange. Having a land line means I spurn that social convention. Spurn baby, spurn. Wouldn't you just like to hang out instead?!
I also sometimes feel discriminated against by people that I know. I don't want to have a big screen tele and a box in my hand poking it all day long, waving my fingers over it like a tool. Several friends have left me out of things merely because invites were sent via text. " I didn't know how to get in touch with you " When having land lines, I have given people my number, but once hearing it's a land line, a lot of people don't even keep it.
I feel like I am left out of the future because I simply do not like some of the downsides of what it has to offer and I do not want to participate in those things because of the costs. For example, the cost to my psyche in the constant barrages of sexist advertisements on the tele. I don't know how to absorb things and filter things out with out somehow being damaged by these things.
I know there are consequences to the choices we make, and I have chosen to be a weird nerd. I am socially unacceptable to most of my generation. I don't have an iPhone to show off, or a cool huge Tele, I don't know how to use Pinterest or Instagram and in a lot of ways I like it that way. I guess I should look at me not having technology as an A-hole limiter, but I feel like technology totally separates people or maybe people separate themselves. This internet and this computer is my life raft to the future, and I use it mostly to talk to other weird nerds. Is that irony?
Anyone else have any thoughts on living with technology and having too much, and living without technology and being left out? What is your relationship with modern day communicative technology, and is that a comfortable relationship for you? How do you think these technologies have affected your life overall? What is your experience?
, etc... Sure, some technology is very beneficial and I've come to realize we don't have to throw the baby out with the bath water. We just need to look at all technology with a discriminating eye and decide whether its benefits outweigh its negative effects. I think pretty much up to date we, as a society, have been a bunch of sheep, in terms of unquestioningly embracing every bit of technology that comes our way. A good book that explains the effects of technology on society and culture is Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. 
He's probably from Washington state.....