With more and more technology moving within reach of our fingertips all the time, it seems we’re practically one cycle behind by the time we download new software or take a device out of its packaging.
That’s one of the reasons I held on to my last phone for more than two and a half years.
Friends and advertisers didn’t make much of a case for picking up the latest thing, knowing something cheaper, faster or more useful is in the works, and will be released within a month or two. I was always the last in line to get new technology, and I still didn’t end up going with the latest and greatest, most-advertised product on the market.
It usually takes a few months for me to save up and talk myself into some sort of upgrade, by which time there’s a newer device, or another version, on a shelf in a store, next to a bunch of shiny cardboard signs. While most of the people I know seem to embrace technology, and run toward it as if it were a source of water and food, I’ve always worried about becoming too dependent on devices.
Power failures, cybertheft and the general fragile nature of plastic parts and wireless technology make me nervous, and I never really want to have all my “technology eggs in one basket.”
The cliché of things not being made the way they used to be is especially true with phones, but I’ve hung on to many things simply because the materials lasted. I hung on to my cassette collection as long as I possibly could — even beyond that fateful 2011 day, when my last remaining cassette-playing stereo began smoking and sparking — literally going down in a blaze of glory.
Cloud-type backups and saving items or data in more than one place is helpful, but it doesn’t seem to make me want to buy new hardware. I also might have more emotional and historical attachment to material things than I probably should. My phone became like a pair of broken-in faded blue jeans — slightly torn and tattered, just the way I liked it.
The phone I’ve recently powered off for the last time had been to high school playoff football games near the Four Corners area and along the Nebraska-Wyoming border, to all four U.S. time zones, through the mountains of West Virginia and out on the Southern California piers that extend over the Pacific Ocean.
If and when we all end up having police-style body cams and/or dashboard cameras, we’ll all end up reviewing tape more thoroughly. We’ll make different decisions about what places we’ll want to return to or avoid, and who to keep in or out of our presence.
Maybe cost and the learning curve of new technology shouldn’t be reasons to hang on to old things — especially phones. It could be that being ridiculed regularly for having outdated hardware is not as painful of fear of being made fun of for not grasping the new tech concepts fast enough.
There will be plenty of steep learning curves ahead, and we might get to the point soon where we’re making choices between food and new phones, at the rate things are going. I’m just trying to always have a valid monthly pass for the bus that travels the once-highly touted “information superhighway.”
Contact Jason W. Brooks at
641-792-3121 ext. 6532
or jbrooks@newtondailynews.com