Phones

It's interesting to live in such a high-tech world. I don't like the idea of being too dependent on technology, nor too 'connected'. I think it can reduce people's patience, require people to be constantly stimulated. However, there's no denying it does make life more convenient, and already it's hard to remember how life was five, ten, fifteen years ago.

For example, there was a time when, if you made plans to meet a person, and you got there, and they didn't come, well, there was really nothing to do but keep waiting, then go home (or find a pay phone and try to call their house). These days, if people are meeting, there's a 10-message preliminary exchange so that you don't really need to make concrete initial plans at all. ('I'm about to leave the station now', 'where are you at the moment?' 'I'm heading toward the restaurant, will prob be about 5 min', 'sorry, is it the restaurant next to Lawson, or the one near the park?')

I remember when I was a kid, getting books from the library, I would have no way to know whether the same author had written other books which weren't in the library, unless they were listed on the cover of the books I did have. If you did find this out, you could possibly go to Dymocks in the city and request they order it in, but this was a bit of a hassle. I remember a few years ago, I was on Amazon and discovered that my favourite ever children's book ('The Giver') had two sequels; with a few clicks I could order them and within days they were at my house.

And ten or fifteen years ago, if you went walking around the streets of suburban Yokohama, and you got totally lost (as is very common for me), and you finally found your way again... well, there'd be no way to find out exactly where you went, what mistake you made, where you should go next time, etc - unless you could procure and read a Japanese road atlas, in Japanese. I would be constantly going around and winging it, never knowing where I was.

These days, however...

I was just on diddlefinger, checking out maps of my neighbourhood, and of the surrounding suburbs, so I could see what convenience stores were where. Before I leave my house I do a quick check of Hyperdia to see when my next train will leave. I use both these sites constantly to check potential routes, work out exactly where I'm going or where I went on a particular day...

However, I'm still a bit behind the times, since a lot of Japanese people would use their cell phones for this purpose. Some people use, I think, a kind of GPS on their phone to get directions; they can check timetables; they can watch TV shows, download and read comics, take decent quality pictures (some phones; not mine ^_^), play games, whatever. People are using mobile Facebook, sending photos to friends, listening to music...

I don't know much about the latest gadgets, nor about the future of technology, but it does seem mobile technology is getting better; more pervasive; that it will be a dominating technology in the near future (as indeed it already is). People are demanding more functionality in their phones; phones are going to be used for so many different purposes that I think that the state of phones now is the tip of the iceberg; we're going to see significant design and functionality changes, breakthroughs, improvements.

As for me, I have no idea what my phone is capable of, since I'm too scared to play with it too much. I don't know exactly what my phone plan includes, but it's the cheapest sort, so I think any deviation from my 'included costs' - such as surfing the Internet - could potentially wrack up huge costs. That's probably the biggest problem at the moment - getting a service like just being able to watch TV on your phone, can cost you, I dunno, $80 or more per month. Compared to your free TV at home, it's got a way to go.