Smart Phones

Communication has finally advanced to a point where communication isn’t necessary.

Since the early days of telecommunication, the goal has always been to bring people together; help them connect. Now it has advanced so far, and people are so connected, that there is no need to deal with people at all.

Surely this was the future Samuel Morse envisioned when he sent the message “What hath God wrought?” to officially open the first telegraph line.

Morse was a painter back in a time where painters actually got paid to do stuff. One day, he was sitting around, painting a portrait, when a message was delivered to him. His wife, who was 300 miles away, was ill, so he rushed home.

In the 1800s, rushing home took days, so by the time he got there, his wife was not only dead, but already buried, because people in the 1800s didn’t waste any time.

Except, of course, when traveling.

After this debacle, Morse though, “Well, THAT was inconvenient. I guess I’ll give up painting to revolutionize life as we know it” and he promptly started up instant long-distance communication.

Over the years, after Alexander Graham Bell created the ability to broadcast his voice, telephones became commonplace. But if one thing stands true about humanity, it’s that we are never satisfied.

People decided that privacy was probably a stupid concept and they wanted to be able to make calls from anywhere. Early mobile phones existed as far back as pre-1950, based around radiowave technology. But it wasn’t convenient enough, so nobody bothers remembering this fact.

Years and years later, people finally created cell phones, which allowed them to make calls to anyone, at any time, from any place.

And….at any cost.

The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the worlds first commercial cellular phone, cost a meager $3,995 dollars. And that’s in 1983 dollars.

As cell phones grew in popularity, they introduced an entirely new way to utilize communication: texting. Texting allowed for a quick, instant message to be sent. Ultimately, texting made communication much more convenient, as you didn’t have to deal with missed calls or voicemails. No, a small, 160 message was instantly delivered, to be read and replied to (ignored?) at the earliest convenience.

Really, the only minor downside to texting was that as soon as it was created, the English language let out a cry, rolled over, and promptly died.

Eventually, with the huge leaps and bounds that technology has taken, smart phones were introduced, and the world was LITERALLY at our fingertips. Not only did we have all of our friends and family ready to contact at the touch of a button, but we also had the internet itself, and therefore all of the information available through that.

And it was because of that fact that we realized we didn’t need to keep communicating with our friends and family at all! And thus, smart phones met their true purpose: destroying communication and relationships as a whole.

Twitter, Facebook, and even blogs are ready and waiting at all times, whereas friends have “lives” and “responsibilities” that keep getting in the way of instant gratification.

And with the actual functions of things like social media, what need does the smart phone owner even HAVE for people? Social media has replaced the need for community! It’s a modern day miracle.

Thanks to smart phones, the world is available to us whenever we want it. Also thanks to smart phones, we can ignore the world as much as we want to.

And modern day communication means we have reached the goal that we’ve always wanted: we can FINALLY talk to people without having to talk to people!