Mobile

I was reading the Time magazine cover story Your Life Is Fully Mobile when my broadband service at home was upgraded to 30M yesterday.When it comes to the wireless mobile technology, Nancy Gibbs has commented that more people have access to mobile device than to a toilet or running water, and the average smart phone today has more computing power than Apollo II when it landed a man on the moon. She dares us to name one example of tool with which so many developed so close a relationship so quickly as we have with our phones. Two-thirds of us, myself included, take a mobile phone to bed with us.

Seriously, technology is a series of changes, some good, many bad.

Which makes me wonder: Just how much the intimate relationship with our gadgets improves the human relationships? Yes, I can now text my wife faster and better than two decades ago. The faster, the better. Everything, that is, except one: romance. When I started dating my wife at the dawn of the cell-phone era in the 1990s, we were calling one another on telephone landlines. For most of us, the memory of that long queue at the student hostel telephone kiosk has stayed for close to twenty years. Because waiting at the end of the queue can last forever in those days, every now and then I ended up running for one kilometre to meet my sweetheart instead.

"What," you might ask, "if you two are separate by far far apart, awfully longer than one kilometre? How can you possibly talk to each other without that mobile device?"

And really, there was no such mobile device (at least not available to me) when I went to Montreal for overseas training around ten years ago. Making a long distance call was one thing: we all know, each of us, that makes the world flat. Paying the phone call was another. So we wrote to each other. That's an added bonus. Believe me, there is a humanity to pen and paper that typing or taping with a stylus (or our thumbs) lack.

A letter with ink - to be exact: hundreds of letters over that one year - lasts much longer than the text messages on the smart phone screen.