Friday, September 7, 2012
Exo-Brain Cell Phone
Recently my cell phone died and refused to be resuscitated. What seemed at first to just be a low battery became a black screen of doom and an infinite start up loop of insanity. My exo brain (Scott Adams, 2010) was dead. I thought for a while maybe the battery needed to be replaced but eventually concluded it was a software glitch and managed to restore factory settings, while being forced to update the OS and losing all my data. I lost my contacts, photos, some music, some apps etc. I am so excited to have my phone back I am writing this blog on it with the new blogger app that I jut got! It's like having a new phone all over again. Because nearly dying is very similar to being reborn... One of the worst things was the full realization of exactly how much information I have exported to my exo brain. Phone numbers, email, addresses... I only know my number, Amy's, my parents and Amy's parents phone numbers. That's it! So when I was at a gas station waiting to get picked up, wondering if Amy would find me, checking to see how many quarters I had, checking to see if the ancient pay phones still worked, unsure who I could call if Amy didn't pick up her phone... I felt alone, nervous, stupid... I am completely, daily, reliant on my exo brain especially for communication, while mostly this is excellent occasionally when technology fails, I am plunged into a darker darkness than I had ever known previously to my technological reliance.
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That's hilarious, Editor-at-Large of Wired UK made almost the same comment about his phone in a recent RSA podcast.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWtlP6tKIaU&feature=g-u-u
great clip!
DeleteI can relate to feeling overly dependent on the exo-brain. Being phone-less makes me feel so socially isolated; I begin to think my friends don't love me because I can't communicate with them. It's hard these days to keep in touch without phones and email and facebook. This is scary because what if your computer and phone breaks? You have to plan ahead and keep commitments more than a day in advance, and that's too much to ask of some people. The way we do life is entirely dependent on instantaneous communication technology. It's not that I want to use a phone and computer all the time, but it's just the way our world works.
ReplyDeleteThere's a similar theme here with Greg's post, The Human Impact. Personally, I would love to live a simpler life that does not require exorbitant amounts of fossil fuels. But weaning our lifestyles off of fossil fuels will be no small task. It will require huge cultural shifts and we all have to be on board for it.
So how far do we go trying to resist dependence on phones and gas? How prepared should we be to go without them? Memorize phone numbers and use paper maps? Make plans more than a day in advance? Start a homestead and get off the grid?