akrish

I have been a hater of smart phones for as long as I can remember. Until recently, I was using the Samsung Smooth – which contrary to its name is more brick-like than smooth – and I was very happy with it. It did what I wanted it to, make calls, send and receive text messages, have a super long battery life, and not break when I treated it like a tennis ball. I was so old-school that I hadn’t even adopted T9 for texting. Then, earlier this summer I caved into the pressure and got an iPhone 4. Everyone says getting a smart phone will change your life in a positive way, but I was always kind of skeptical. After a couple of months with my fancy new phone, I still don’t really feel like it has dramatically changed my life, and in fact it might be making me more introverted, which is terrible.

When I really think about it, I don’t really use my iPhone’s capabilities all that much. On a daily basis, the only third-party app I really use is twitter, and pretty much I only check that while I’m eating breakfast, which I could just as easily do in front of my computer. I also listen to music on my phone a lot, but this just replaced my ipod shuffle. I will say that it is convenient to not have to carry so many things around (i.e. phone, mp3 player, camera, etc.). On rarer occasions, I use the maps app and the camera feature, particularly when I’m travelling, but again this is just a substitute for planning ahead. I also occasionally use twitter in places where I don’t have access to a computer, although I’m not sure how much utility this is really adding to my life. I don’t really think it’s necessary to stay that up to date with whatever’s going on the world (to the point where you know what happened in the last 20 minutes), and my personal tweets are mostly pointless.

The times when I use my phone most are the times when I could/should be interacting with other people. For example, I have recently started writing blog posts while waiting for the bus on the way to and from work. Instead of staring at my phone, I could make small talk with the other commuters and maybe meet some cool, interesting people. This would actually be really useful for me since I don’t have a established social network where I live. This also happens when I carpool to ultimate practices and tournaments; my teammates and I spend most of the car ride checking news and other things on our phones rather than talking to each other. This was primarily the reason why I didn’t want a smart phone in the first place.

I’ve considered the possibility that I don’t have the right suite of apps to make the most of my device, but I haven’t found many of the apps my friends recommend to be all that useful. A lot of people recommend games to me, but their novelty dies out really quickly and I find that they soon just clutter my home screen. This is also true of most of the social apps, I’m not that big a Facebook/Google+ user as it is, so I rarely see the need to check these things while I’m away from a computer.

I’ve pretty much realized that the phone provides convenience, that can mostly be negated by thinking ahead and planning. And in return, you pay for it by missing out on social interactions, since it’s so much easier to get lost in your phone than take some effort and talk to people.

I don’t mean to sound so negative, I honestly think that smart phone technology is incredible; I’m just not sure how positively life changing the technology is.

Alan Turing is hailed as the father of computer science. Yet he lived more than half a century ago, in a time when computers were incredibly different from what we recognize today. I’m taking a introduction to cs theory course this semester and we’ve been talking about some of Turing’s (and other theoretician’s) discoveries. The fact that most of the discoveries were made in the 30s and 40s truly boggles my mind. How can people make claims like, “There are functions that cannot be expressed by any programming language,” when the concept of a computer or a programming language has barely been defined? What’s even more amazing to me, is that many of these theories were correct and their proofs are still accepted today.

This train of thought got me thinking about what our lives would be like without technology, or at least without computers (There isn’t much correlation, I know). No doubt most of our lives would be drastically different. I spend tons of time in front of a computer hacking, reading news, email, and relaxing. Maybe it’s because I’m a computer science student that really enjoys programming, or maybe it’s because I’m a college student who gets most of his resources through his computer (via the internet). Whatever it is, my computer plays an integral role in my life and I can’t even imagine life would be like without one.

Maybe life would be a lot simpler. I’d wake up, have a cup of tea while reading the newspaper and walk over to class rather than wake up and immediately check my email (aka work). My deadlines would be a lot more relaxed because it’s harder to do things without the aid of computers. I wouldn’t be under as much stress (not that I’m really stressed out now) because my superiors (manager, professor, etc.) could not set incredibly high expectations for my performance. I read an article about how technology makes life more stressful awhile ago and in many respects I agree with it. Unfortunately, I can’t direct you to the article because I forgot pretty much everything about it.

At the same time, social dynamics would change. Rather than spend time IMing my friends or writing on their Facebook wall, I’d actually see my friends and spend time with them. There would be a lot more “quality” time with your friends because we’d all have more free time (I think) and we wouldn’t spend that time idly on the internet (because it wouldn’t exist). This sounds like a really good thing and one of my problems with computers is that it makes us (well me) a lot more anti-social.

Yet computers can’t be all bad. They make information much more accessible to the public, they make interaction and communication much easier and the also foster innovation. Without a computer, I’d master the Dewey Decimal system and know all the ins and outs of my campus library system. Now, I just use Wikipedia. The internet makes it easy for professors to post lecture notes and course information for the class to see, thus discouraging students from attending lectures, but nonetheless, communication is greatly facilitated. This company that I’m starting revolves entirely around computers. Obviously we’d have no business idea if computers didn’t exist. Certainly these are all good things.

So I’m sort of at odds. In some respects computers are really good but life seems like it would be so simple and wholesome if we didn’t have them. I guess the conflict doesn’t really matter since computers are here to stay anyway, but it’s interesting to think about what I’d be like if there weren’t computers. What would I be studying? What kinds of things would I enjoy doing? Would I spend more time outside? I don’t really know but it’s fun to take a break from reading about databases to think about these things.