The conversation flowed that day with energy and information until someone picked up their phone, punched in a number and began talking. We sat in shocked silence while the rude one talked.
It wasn’t my first experience with a deliberate, chosen technological intrusion – that occurred during the early years of car phones. A young woman asked me to accompany her on a short car trip. I climbed in her vehicle ready to chat. She picked up her car phone, called another friend and never acknowledged my presence the entire trip.
The next time it happened, I battled a computer hook-up through our landline phone. I needed the phone contact as I prepared for a big event. Exasperated with my inability to call home, I declared the Internet off limits for the duration. Technology facilitates emergencies and improves communication except in the hands of phonaholics or computer addicts.
Don’t get me wrong, I know the pull of researching eBay. I enjoy the convenience of ordering online and the immediacy of finding an answer to a question, but … I do not enjoy sitting beside someone else as they chat or text with absent friends. Nor do I enjoy watching as they Google their way around the world and mutter “look at that” to me. That is not relating or interacting. That is me watching the other person entertain themselves and presuming I find it equally entertaining.
Technology facilitates many things – including personal rudeness. Such as the time a guest, with our permission, logged onto our computer and proceeded to watch online comedy shows in another language – while several other people in the room tried to converse. The next time we were asked to use the computer, we strong suggested they join our activities.
Having said all of that, I will choose a scanner any day for entering text into a computer instead of having to type in every single word. I value the frugality of shooting hundreds of digital pictures and storing them on a slip of a piece of plastic. I enjoy the technological options for keeping in contact with folks. To that end I check out several weblogs regularly – especially last week I avidly read and studied my son’s weblog http://hexmode.com/.
He is half way around the world in Rwanda on a business trip. Believe me, I want to see that he had an ordinary day of work and snapped touristy photos of ordinary sites in that all too recently, war-torn third-world nation.
He is there as the computer expert for IntraHealth. The Rwandan Ministry of Health asked IntraHealth to establish a computerized system for the records of the health workers. While I remain a bit skeptical of having all of my medical and financial records in some web connected digitized system, I saw the advantage after viewing IntraHealth picture of third-world medical records on his October blog – dusty notebooks overflowing with doctor notes yellowed with age as they slumped and staggered across a gray metal shelf, in a forgotten a wooden shed. They need an application of IntraHealth’s mission “to mobilize local talent to create sustainable and accessible health care” … including modern technological means of storing medical records.
Love it. Hate it. Use it. Abuse it. Technology has come bearing gifts of convenience and a better life. I accept that, but please check your hat and your phone at the door when you come over to visit.