Thursday, September 30, 2010

iPhone blogging

It's actually quite tedious blogging from an iPhone, so this will be a short one.

They are quite nifty little units, but they have their limitations. When I first got one I was expecting it to be a lot more gimmicky than it was. The email feature is handy, it syncs with outlook and has a web browser. For serious business use though, you can't go past the Blackberry. But considering I only really need it to play games whilst on the toilet, it does the job nicely.

I was thinking today about the 80's, when there were no mobile phones, no SMS, no facebook, no blogs, no wikipedia, no online maps and no emails. If you said to your friends "I'll meet you at the show at 7", you went there at 7 and hoped your friends would turn up within visual range. If you couldn't find them, you would go for a wander and hope to run into them. Then if you couldn't find them after that you would go to a payphone and call their house. If they weren't there, you would call around your other friend's houses to see if they were there, or if not speak to someone who might know where they went. Then if you still couldn't find them you would assume they were there somewhere and enjoy the show, because if you didn't end up running into them at the show you would probably catch up with them next week some time.

Now days, you say "I'll meet you at the show at 7", then when you turn up, SMS them saying "I'm here". If they don't turn up within 5 minutes you SMS them again saying "where the hell are you?" and then if you still can't find them you ring them and stay on the phone trading landmarks until you bump into each other. You enjoy the show and enter several facebook status updates to the effect, then go home and write about it on your blog, entering a google maps reference link so people could see exactly where on earth you had such a great time. Your friends read your blog and post replies containing links to humorous topics on wikipedia that relate to something you were talking about. Then when you get to work on Monday you email your work friends telling them what a great time they missed out on.

You know what I'm going to say next, right? It was better when everything was so much simpler? Wrong! I think technology is fantastic, and the fact that it's so much easier to communicate with everybody these days is brilliant. I'm so glad I found my high school reunion being organized on facebook, and that I can stay in touch with old buddies via a simple SMS or email, whereas in the 80's I would have long lost touch with them unless I sat down and wrote an actual letter, on actual paper with an actual pen, then stuck it in an actual post box and hope it made it.

So I'm all for technology. But I think my next blog will be touch-typed whilst sitting at my good old pc - my index finger is killing me!

No comments:

Post a Comment