Texting I’m All Thumbs

You know you’re old when the kid sitting next to you on the park bench is happily typing on her mobile phone with her thumbs as fast as she can talk, meanwhile, you are struggling typing “Hi” using every finger possible.

“How many messages have you sent?” I ask the kid as I continue to struggle with my “thumbing.”

“Fifteen,” she says, not even breaking her concentration as she continues texting.

Even in the office, I am starting to feel like an out dated paper weight, as I watch the new generation on the corporate ladder text their way to the top. In meetings, I see these new young people sitting off on the corner of the table, thumbs moving so fast you can see the motion blur.

“One meeting,” I interrupt.

“Uh?” they scoff.

“May we have one meeting, PLEASE?” I scold, as I sternly tell the new kid in the office to stop texting and pay attention.

That’s another thing – attention spans just don’t exist anymore, everyone under thirty these days seems to pre-occupied with their digital devices.

Evrythn is shortened thse dys. SO even if I were to take away the kid’s BlackBerry, I’d never understand what was on it.

The short forms used for texting help the kid thumb her messages lightening quick, but a side effect is she talks the way she texts, so half the time when you talk to her, you haven’t a clue what she just said.

I wonder if scientists have come up with a long horrible sounding phrase for that condition?

If they aren’t texting a friend, tweeting their latest thought on Twitter, chatting on Facebook, then they are fiddling with their MP3 music player, or they are watching a video on their mobile device, or they are shooting a “pic” to send to their buddies.

With their heads constantly buried in their electronic gadgets, it’s a wonder they can see where they are going.

I swear the new kid never looks up from her BlackBerry.

Whatever happened to the old days, when people used to actually talk to each other face-to-face? Those were the days, when you could actually see how the team was doing, instead of being texted emoticons – punctuation marks combined together to graphically represent emotions.

Since when did :) replace a smile?

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You know you’re old when the kid sitting next to you on the park bench is happily typing on her mobile phone with her thumbs as fast as she can talk, meanwhile, you are struggling typing “Hi” using every finger possible.

“How many messages have you sent?” I ask the kid as I continue to struggle with my “thumbing.”

“Fifteen,” she says, not even breaking her concentration as she continues texting.

Even in the office, I am starting to feel like an out dated paper weight, as I watch the new generation on the corporate ladder text their way to the top. In meetings, I see these new young people sitting off on the corner of the table, thumbs moving so fast you can see the motion blur.

“One meeting,” I interrupt.

“Uh?” they scoff.

“May we have one meeting, PLEASE?” I scold, as I sternly tell the new kid in the office to stop texting and pay attention.

That’s another thing – attention spans just don’t exist anymore, everyone under thirty these days seems to pre-occupied with their digital devices.

Evrythn is shortened thse dys. SO even if I were to take away the kid’s BlackBerry, I’d never understand what was on it.

The short forms used for texting help the kid thumb her messages lightening quick, but a side effect is she talks the way she texts, so half the time when you talk to her, you haven’t a clue what she just said.

I wonder if scientists have come up with a long horrible sounding phrase for that condition?

If they aren’t texting a friend, tweeting their latest thought on Twitter, chatting on Facebook, then they are fiddling with their MP3 music player, or they are watching a video on their mobile device, or they are shooting a “pic” to send to their buddies.

With their heads constantly buried in their electronic gadgets, it’s a wonder they can see where they are going.

I swear the new kid never looks up from her BlackBerry.

Whatever happened to the old days, when people used to actually talk to each other face-to-face? Those were the days, when you could actually see how the team was doing, instead of being texted emoticons – punctuation marks combined together to graphically represent emotions.

Since when did :) replace a smile?

Talk Time Not Drive Time

Canada’s largest province is going hands-free – sort of.

Drivers in Ontario, Canada, will face fines up to $500CDN if they watch, listen, text, type, email, dial, or talk on any hand-held device while driving. This ban includes all cell phones, smart phones, portable video games and DVD players.

The ban on using hand-held devices takes effect Oct. 26, but begins with a gradual three-month public education grace period, where offenders will be sternly warned, but not fined. Repeat offenders may not only be fined, but could also be charged with additional infractions, such as careless driving, which adds more fines, lost demerit points, and the possibility of being tossed in jail.

Hands-free devices are not included in the ban. However, the province doesn’t condone their use, saying drivers need their full attention focused on the operation of their vehicles.

Bravo Queen’s Park – the province’s legislative assembly -- for taking the right steps towards protecting us all.

Image via Wikipedia

Over 50 countries already have banned yacking on your cell phone (or other mobile device) while driving, because statistics show an increase in accidents involving those on these communication marvels. Other jurisdictions which have banned using hand-held devices while driving include Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, and California and New York states in the U.S.A.

A study by the VirginiaTech Transportation Institute says truck drivers are 23 times more likely to have a crash if they are sending a text message, when compared to drivers not “texting.” The study also found that “texting” took a driver’s focus off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds – that’s enough time to travel the length of a football field at about 60KM/hour.

Another study by Clemson University found drivers that text message and use their iPods are 10 percent more likely to accidentally drift into another lane or off the road completely.

There are already far too many bad drivers out on our public roads, giving them the ability to talk – or worse – text message – while driving is no less dangerous than giving a kid a loaded shot gun and saying, “have fun.”

Granted, driving is second nature to most of us, we do it so often, we sometimes forget that it actually involves a lot of muscle control, attention to details, and quick thinking – just to name a few of the many skills we employ while sitting behind the wheel.

And if you believe some of the hype, those radicals calling for cell phone bans while driving compare it to drinking and driving. However that analogy is far fetched, although cell phones distract drivers, they don’t physically change a driver’s cognitive abilities, as alcohol does by slowing the firing of neurons in the brain.

There are so many distractions to motorists – from the traffic around them, to the radio and CD player in their own vehicle, to the numerous signs, billboards, and pedestrians surrounding them.

Add in the ability to check your voicemail, text message your friends about getting together after work, or even trying to pick up members of the opposite sex on a singles dating chat line (as one teenage girl was doing, when she rolled her dad’s brand new four-wheeled drive BMW a few months back) – can you really oppose this new legislation in Ontario?

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The Future Now

Yesterday as I was going through my snail-mail, I came across an interesting promotional letter from my telecom provider.

They were advising me that since I subscribed to their home phone service, and digital TV service, that I was receiving a new service completely free – TV Call Waiting.

This new service will display a person’s name and number on my TV screen, as well as on my phones. The feature even allows me to send the call directly to voice-mail simply by hitting a button on my remote control.

Pretty cool tool. It could be annoying, especially if you are glued to the couch watching your favorite shows, but there still is an element of “wow” to this new technological development.

Whether you love it or hate it, the real “wow” factor comes from a little forward-looking thinking. Back in the 1990’s, there was all this talk about the convergence of communications technologies.

The first big convergence brought on by technology was the Internet and the mass media. Television, radio and newspapers were the most popular forms people around the world got their information. As the Internet developed, it became possible to watch live streaming video online, listen to live streaming audio and even to read complete newspapers online – with hyperlinks for additional information. This became known as the media convergence, and many say it sparked a death sen

Image via Wikipedia

tence to for newspapers, because it is far easier and more efficient to watch a video online, than it is to read an entire series of stories in print.

Convergence was the buzz word given to discuss the morphing of television, radio, home theatre systems, phone systems, even your kitchen appliances with computers. Futurists dreamt allowed about a world where you could call home from work, turn on the oven to start your pot roast remotely while checking your messages. Then later that day, you’d arrive home with a nice hot pot roast just waiting for you.

We’ve seen the greatest form of convergence in the mobile telecommunications market. The first cell phones were huge clunkers that often didn’t even have a signal, because cell phone technology was so new and expensive. These days, cell phones are teeny-tiny, and do more than act as phones. Most have cameras in them, some allow you to play music, others allow you to surf the net, send video messages, open Word and other MS-Office documents, you even can use a built-in GPS to tell you where you are, and how to get to where you want to be.

Smart home technology has improved over the years, but it is far from the wild dreams of the futurists back in the 1990’s. But with small technological first-steps, like my telco’s TV Call Display, we’re slowly but steadily moving closer to that automated world.

I’ve had digital cable for years, and as long as I’ve been a subscriber, you can order movies onDemand or Pay-Per-View with a click of a button. Simple point and click, and the movie begins, while the charges appear on my next cable bill.

This two-way form of communications over a cable TV connection was never possible under the older analogue system, and it opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

One day, you will be able to order products the same way you can order movies – just by pressing a button on your remote control. Imagine watching some infomercial late at night, and seeing a fantastic product that you want right then and there. All you have to do is point your remote at the cable box, click the button to order it, confirm your order by entering your PIN code, and wait for your new fangled thing to arrive in the mail.

Other cool “wow” factor technologies which we may see from these developments include – of all things – home security.

Many people have wireless home security cameras in and around their homes, and can view these cameras from anywhere in the world over the Internet. There was one incident just this past summer, where a lady called police from work, to report a break in at her home, which she was watching live over the Intern

et.

Many automated security systems will alert the police when something isn’t just right. Imagine having all the doors lock on the inside and outside – trapping the intruder until the local law enforcement agents have arrived.

But where convergence has the most impact isn’t on technology, it is on us. Convergence is affecting our socio-economic world in ways unthinkable back in the 1990’s.
Online social networking sites like Facebook an d Twitter make it possible to reconnect with long lost friends and family, or to just meet completely new people in a non-threatening way.

“Texting” has become a socially acceptable form of communications, and “sexting” (sending sexually explicit text messages) has become a big problem for parents with pre-teen and teenage kids.

You no longer have to ever go to the office, just work virtually from home, checking email and logging into the network remotely to do your work.
Smart technologies are already making their way into our lives, just not as quickly as those singing the convergence song back in the 1990’s told us they would.

Technology is constantly changing and converging with. It will be interesting in five and ten-years, looking back, to see how far forward we have come.

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How Technology Mastered Us

Image by mikeleeorg via Flickr

As the phone rings, I get my fingers ready to dial the extension of the person I’m trying to reach. I’m almost always thrown off these days when a living, breathing human being actually answers the phone. When that happens, there is usually an awkward silence, because it’s so rare in today’s high tech world.

“Oh!” I exclaim, “you’re real! I’m sorry, I thought you were a machine.”

Whatever happened to those days – when telephone calls were between two or more living, breathing human beings?

I just got off the phone from that call I was making, and sure enough I get the automated attendant asking me to enter the other party’s extension. I enter it, and after a few rings, I get his voice-mail. I leave a message and hang up. Absolutely no human contact whatsoever -- yet the telephone originally was designed to bring people closer together.

I remember a slogan from an old AT&T television commercial in the 1980’s – reach out and touch someone. The series of commercials won awards in the advertising industry for its moving portrayal showing tearful eyed family and friends reaching out and touching their loved ones over great distances.

That was back in the 1980’s, just as personal computers were starting to pop-up in our homes. And the Internet – unless you were working in some secret American military base in deep cover, or a professor at some big university fighting to make that secret public, forget about it. Home computers in the 1980’s were considered top-of-the-line if they had a hard drive – most only had those big flimsy 5.25-inch floppy disks.

Looking back to those days, it always amazes me as I consider how far we have come.

These days, I know nine times out of 10 when I call someone, chances are I’ll be greeted by an automated voice-mail system. So I instinctively have my 30-second-or-less message ready to go in my mind’s eye, and I know to either enter an extension or wait for the beep.

Technology has trained us well.

The other day I was at a bank machine in the city’s downtown core. An elderly woman who probably didn’t venture downtown too often was getting frustrated at the machine, thinking it wasn’t working correctly, because it wasn’t beeping when she pressed the buttons.

In many large city centres, some banks have disabled the tones given off by their bank machines in outdoor spaces, to reduce crime. Apparently, some people can actually nab your PIN by listening carefully to the tones.

I waited patiently behind this sweet old lady, as she ran back and forth from the tellers to the bank machine, having one of the tellers come out and explain this to her.

The old lady was trained by technology to automatically think that if the bank machine didn’t “bleep” out the numbers as you entered them, the machine had to be broken.

We are a highly adaptive society, and when a new piece of technology emerges, we learn its teachings quickly.

I remember reading about some teenager that won about half-a-million dollars in a contest to determine who the fastest text messager was.

I have one of those smart phones, and it sure has a bigger keypad from the cell phones I’ve had in the past. It is even on that 3G network, so it’s supposed to be fast – though I hear 4G is already on the way.

Even still, when it comes to sending text messages, I’m all thumbs. I use that T-9 predictive text system, which guesses most of the time the correct word I want, based on my typing habits over time. But I still constantly find myself having to erase and start words over again, simply because just as I start to get up to speed, I realize I’m “texting” too fast, and I hit the wrong combination of keys.

But a young kid in her teens – she might have even been in her pre-teens, won a large sum of money, for being able to do this.

She was trained well by technology too. She knew all the short forms commonly used to speed up the process.

That’s the problem with today’s technology – it is making the world a faster, easier place, but we’re losing that human element. We’re losing the very things which make us human, as we ourselves become more computerized, in our constantly evolving high-tech world.

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