Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/16268
THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Hello? by MARGARET DICKSON I realized how dependent I really am earlier in mid-July when a sudden downpour got to my cell phone, actually my hand-held computer, and it began behaving bizarrely. My heart rate literally accelerated at the very thought of losing the hundreds contacts and their various information — phone numbers and e-mail addresses — stored in that tiny device. How, I fretted, could I ever replace all that information gathered over years of meetings, business card exchanges, and encounters with old friends? It was enough to keep me awake at night. Blessedly, my story has a happy, if expensive, ending. My phone could not be saved, and I had to shell out for a new one, but through technology and a fellow who really knows how to use — and charges for — that knowledge, my precious contact information was recovered and loaded into the latest version of my lost device. The entire episode was a lesson in why all of us should routinely back up our hand-held’s data on our computers even though I still do not do it. I guess I will just have to think of myself as a risk taker in the cell phone department. At any rate, my little scare, and writing those large checks, got me thinking about how important this new and expanding technology has become to us and how we use it differently. My 20-something precious jewels certainly use it more easily and naturally than I do. They and those born after them are called “technology natives,” meaning that they were born into a time when computers and hand-held technologies were already part of their world. They grew up with them and their usage expanded as the technologies did. In other words, they use them intuitively, because they have never not had them. My Baby Boomer generation is comprised of “technology immigrants,” meaning that we can learn to use new technologies, but most of us have to work at it. It is not intuitive for us, and some of us never really get it, because we are too apprehensive about it or maybe too lazy to work at it. I have even heard some members of my generation complain that their “fi ngers are just too big.” A recent Washington Post article by Ian Shapira highlighted one generational difference that I see in my own family—telephone usage. I have learned in recent years that if I need to communicate with a Precious Jewel quickly, send a text. E-mails can take hours or days for a response, and a voice mail is almost shouting in the wind. A text, however, arrives immediately with a beep or a vibration that is diffi cult to ignore since they know that I know that their devices are almost always close at hand. Shapira reports that a new communications etiquette is even emerging in which a telephone call is considered somewhat intrusive, even rude, since it may interrupt someone or put that person on the spot for a immediate response to something he or she would prefer the luxury of mulling over in the form of a text. It is the same sort of screening of communication that we Baby Boomers discovered and still do with our once new-fangled answering machines. It is also a way of controlling and managing time. A telephone conversation demands a block of time while a text, often written in a kind of shorthand code that has emerged as texting has expanded, takes only seconds and can be done while the texter is engaged in something else as well. Statistics bear out our communications changes. The two Baby Boomer Dicksons continue to pay for a land line into our home even though we each have personal phones. Only one Precious Jewel does, however, refl ecting a dramatic downturn in the number of such telephones in American homes. The number of cell phones continues to grow, of course, but we are apparently using them less. Industry data shows that between 1993 and 2009, the average cell phone conversation dropped from 2.38 minutes to 1.81. Texting, on the other hand, ballooned a stunning 1,840 percent over the same period. In other words, most of us seem to be telling each other just the facts, ma’am, and the only people really still yakking it up on traditional telephones are those of my generation. In addition, many of us now make appointments to talk to each other on the phone. I have sent many an e-mail setting up a phone call at such and such a time, because that is the only way I know of to be sure I can actually speak with that person. I fi nd practice this much less frustrating than trying to track someone down, particularly someone who may be less interested in the conversation than I am. Baby Boomers can assign blame to “technology” for all these changes in the ways we communicate with each other, but prior generations changed as well, from smoke signals and yodeling across the mountain to “Gladys, would you ring my sister?” I do wonder, though, how my Precious Jewels will communicate with theirs. MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com. WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM SEPTEMBER 15-21, 2010 UCW 5