GET SMART!

I’ve almost persuaded myself that what I really, really need to get my life back on track is a smartphone of some kind. That’s it. That’s all I require and all the vagueness and lack of direction in my sad little life will just float way and I will have a sense of belonging to the world again.

So, what exactly has prompted this epiphany?

Well, I’m not exactly sure, but all those articles about web addiction and families grunting at each other as they focus upon their smartphones over the breakfast table instead of talking to the real people actually in the room with them has started to make me think. After all, if these things are now so commonplace that the only way for the average family to communicate with each other is by texting a request to pass the milk to the person sitting next to you and ignoring you, how can someone without such a vital piece of kit hope to make contact with anyone else at all?

Then there are those actually taking business calls when they are on holiday, or lying on the most beautiful beach in the world but looking the same little screen they do for the rest of the year and sending the same texts to the same people so they might as well be in their own bedrooms with the curtains drawn for all the actual living they are doing. If these things are that distracting and unmissable to make a beautiful sunset or the grandest of panoramas seem redundant, then they must be doing something very special indeed, mustn’t they?

I did briefly pause and start to wonder whether we’ve started creating a culture where nobody is bothering to actually grow up, a kind of electronics based “Neverland” full of boys and girls trapped inside adult bodies lost in their little electronic boxes playing instead of living, but I dismissed this as the kind of Luddite nonsense that caused those without access to such wonders to fling their shoes into the looms and Spinning Jennies instead of just coming to terms with the future and learning to live with the black smoke gushing out of those magnificent brick-built chimneys. After all, you can’t have progress without doing a little bit of harm, can you?

So, you see, I’ve really convinced myself that I really need a smartphone myself. Some kind of handy little device which will combine mobile web access, a camera, a sat nav, music player, TV, book, telephone and countless other things I’ve yet to find out about all in one handy little box of tricks. There are all sorts of games, too, although I never actually play any games, and a jolly useful thing that seems to tell everyone in the world where I am at any given moment, and also presumably that my house is empty too. Then, for a mad moment, I convinced myself that I didn’t actually need any of this stuff at all and the argument went bouncing back and forth in my head for a while before I saw sense.

Granted, I am rarely more than a few feet from my current internet access, and when I am out and about I’m either driving or actually doing something, so, for the perhaps ten minutes in any typical week when I might suddenly think I really must check my email (not that I get all that much to be honest), then it’s simply a “must have” item, and, when, on those rare occasions when I do go out without a camera, well, I simply must have another picture taking option to post all the picture of all the exciting things I don’t actually do in a place where no-one will actually want to look at them. So what if I’ve managed to get this far through life without a sat nav by merely looking up the route on a road map and writing down a few notes...? That doesn’t allow for the unexpected, does it? Not that I’ve actually got anywhere in particular that I want to go, and, yes, I barely play any of my CDs as it is, and I can always throw one of my many books into a handy pocket if I need to read something because I don’t actually tend to read more than one book at once, and I do already have a mobile telephone, but, hey, I still really, really need a smartphone.

Why do I believe I want such a thing? An obviously insane person might try to persuade me that I’ve just bought into this media myth that this is somehow the future and if I want to remain part of society I really must have this thing in order to function in society. They might try to reassure me that it’s simply impossible that this thing will ever go out of fashion or become obsolete before I’ve even finished paying for it, but what do they know? They may even try to convince me that all the manufacturing of parts and shipping of my pointless new toy, and all those microwave signals and built-in obsolescence is bad for the planet, but then they said that about the factories at the dawn of the industrial revolution, and about the motor car and that all turned out fine, didn’t it...?

In their madness, they might try to point out that, for all the rinky-dinky little “apps” this box of tricks might offer me, there is a perfectly legitimate alternative available, or they might put forward a very sound argument that simply says that I never would actually need it or use most of what it might say it can do.

For example, they might conceivably point out that my house has a landline that, on a good week will only ring at most five times. More often than not the call will be from one or other of our mothers ringing at the most inconvenient moment possible, or if not that, then it will be somebody in a call centre half way across the globe trying to persuade me to buy something else I neither need nor actually want.

“Pish and tosh!” think I, as if such things could happen on a smartphone. The clue’s in the name, obviously, so how could anything like that be allowed to happen? It would be clever enough to filter such a thing out, wouldn’t it?

The adverts try to convince me that I can reconnect with my friends faster with my shiny new gadget when I’m out and about, and it does seem to me that I see people sitting with real genuine actual people but still looking at their little screens instead. Also, I don’t actually have that many friends, and I see them so rarely and that isn’t likely to change any time soon, so unless I have one so that I can start to fit in with what everyone else in society is doing and sit staring at my own little screen full of fun I’m never going to feel like I belong, am I? It’s obvious when you think about it.

I did a bit of research, looking at tariffs and suchlike and I realised that it’s an absolute bargain if I add up around £35 a month for 24 months, and so I’d only be spending around £840 (plus whatever pittance the unit price is) on something that those mad folk want you to think that I don’t really need, but have been brainwashed into thinking that I absolutely want and, if you believe the mad person, I really wouldn’t use all that much.

Cheap at half the price.

After all, it’s not like I could use that sort of money for a holiday or a downpayment on a car or anything useless like that, is it?