Remember when we were young and use to ask our parents for disposable cameras so we could take pictures of ourselves? And when they got developed, we’d take them to school and show all of our friends? Man…those were the days. O that’s right…NO ONE DID THAT.
Pictures that you take of yourself now have a definition within the English dictionary: Selfies. I think selfies are ridiculous. Especially the ones where someone pretends that they aren’t taking a picture of themselves. Come on, man…You’re not fooling anyone…
I remember when I got my first phone when I was 16. You couldn’t even touch me on Snake. If you weren’t playing on the highest speed, you weren’t really even playing…
This was back when I had limited cell phone minutes, a battery that lasted one day if it was on, and everything was in black and…gray? Green? What the hell was that color?
I remember when my friend got a phone and it played a polyphonic version of Still Fly by the Big Tymers. I literally couldn’t believe a phone could do that.
Slowly, things started evolving, and we started having greater functionality. We had color, and then pictures, and then video, and then touch screen, and then we had social media connectivity. You’re telling me I can take a picture, and because I’m connected to Facebook, my phone will automatically recognize who I just took a photo of just in case I want to tag them? Look at how far we’ve come in the past 10 years (for better or worse).
It’s incredible to think how much we feel connected to our phones. They are such a critical part of our lives, and one of the pats in the Three Pocket Pat that most guys do. OUR cell phone is something that is extremely personal to us, and we often feel different or anxious when we don’t have it on us or immediately know where it is. We feel weird when we have to use someone else’s phone that doesn’t have our settings, or we get nervous when someone else uses our phone. It’s incredible to think that this little device can do so much for us.
Every phone starts out as a blank canvas, and it’s your usage that makes it unique from anyone else’s phone. Think about the sheer amount of iPhones that are out there in the world (if you’re wondering, it’s about 387 Million). That’s millions of blank slates. From the moment we have it, it starts becoming more and more a part of our life. It’s strange, but I think it’s one of the few investments where the reason that we fear losing it changes. When you first get it, you fear losing it because it’s expensive. But after time, you fear losing it because of how much of YOU is on there. The physical value of the item diminishes, but the sentimental value dramatically increases.
You enter your contacts, you make your phone calls, you text your friends. All of that data is different from any other phone in the world. You begin documenting the world from your point of view, and for the first time ever, life is being captured in a way that it has never been captured before. You can lay out all of your photos, videos, texts, etc, and if you strung all of those together, someone could get a very clear picture of what the world was like in your eyes. Imagine what your kids would think if they looked at your phone. Imagine what you would think if you looked at your parents’ phones if they had the tech we have now.
You combine that with social media, and that’s you. Sure, we don’t see everything, but we get your point of view, what you looked like, and we see your personality. What else is missing?
I think some technology leads us down a path of vanity and laziness, which results in unintentional awkwardness. I think phone companies WANT to put cameras on the front of phones because it allows us to take pictures of ourselves. I think they want smarter texting because it’s easier. Both things make us feel good. But in real life, if I took 30 pictures of myself, and showed them to my grandma, she’d probably ask what was wrong with me and why I didn’t have any friends. She’d stop me at 10 and tell me to get over myself.
And thank God for texting. I don’t know how I’d be able to talk to people. I’m already awkward as it is, I couldn’t imagine not being able to text someone I just met instead of trying to actually talk to them.
I don’t know what this post was really for. Then again, most of my posts don’t have a reason. I think it’s incredible that each of our phones share our personality and our life. But I hope that we’re not so focused on documenting our lives through a screen that we’re missing everything outside of it.
Thanks for reading.
– The Snake Master
