P.S. talking about cellphones…I once wanted to make a tee-shirt that said, “If I wanted to hear somebody else’s conversation, I’d listen to my husband.”
The flip side of that is that I arbitrarily just don’t show up to work because I can work just as easily from home. I remember one time I my boss called me and was like “you aren’t in the office?!” I’m like “you’re in England. What do you care where I am?”
Kevin Kelly (one of the founders of Wired who spent some time as a semi-Luddite) wrote a book pretty much devoted to this topic called What Technology Wants. It’s not perfect (what is?), but is the best long-form address on this topic I’ve seen.
If you’re concerned about technology from an evolutionary perspective, I’d highly recommend it. It might not have the answer, but it’s got plenty of food for thought.
Oh. I see. You’re one of the those. I don’t get how people can constantly ignore the archeological records that clearly indicate that the sherbet-pooping mastodons were extinct millions of years before humans sprouted up.
Technology is great—especially when it works. I happen to be staying now in a student residence at UBC (Vancouver) and the outside doors have magnetic locks. But the lock on the main door closest to my room is not working despite, they tell me, repeated attempts to repair it over the few months. So I have to go out of my way to find a side door to enter. Old fashioned locks could never go out of order in the way. But I generally feel that life is better with more technology.