Today’s lifestyle is shaped by technology–for better and for worse
[by Bruce Newman- San Jose Mercury News]
With a fierce hold on the bedrock tool of our time, 21st-century man wraps his life around a most modern convenience — the smartphone — and begins his day, thumbs flying.
These portals in the palm of our hands are passports to a nearly friction-free online world, where long lines are banished, where Bach and the Beatles wait to be summoned from our pockets, and where global positioning satellites descend from the cloud with maps.
The upheaval has reordered our lives around easier, faster and more impersonal ways of doing almost everything. We’ve been swept up in a global “service economy” that distributes entire industries into new categories of digitally-enabled winners and brick-and-mortar losers.
It also has upended the relationship between digital natives, who find all this convenience so natural, and their graying elders, warily embracing technology’s possibilities, while missing quaint modalities like face-to-face conversation.
Phones and family
As the Moore family wakes up, eyes blink open, and screens blink on in every room of their home. Randy, 18, sleeps with his iPhone. Dylan, 14, doesn’t know where his mobile phone is, and doesn’t care. But 12-year-old sister Alyssa sleeps with her iPhone under her pillow.
When her father comes to wake her, he often finds her in bed, phone already in hand — thumbs flying. “Which is somewhat disturbing to me,” Bill, 58, said.
He has been pulled along by his family into a world of e-commerce, e-vites and just enough convenience that he has surrendered.
By 7 a.m. on most days, Bill has already answered emails and texts from employees at his construction business. He used to have to drive all over the San Francisco Bay Area to deliver design plans to prospective customers; now he texts them, and usually gets an annotated response within minutes.
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