I recently saw a young man get knocked 10 feet in the air by a fast moving car he never saw because he was busy text messaging as he crossed the busy street. It would be ironic if the driver was also tweeting, she was too shaken to relate what she was doing when she plowed into him.
Precious youth getting wiped out by cars, Senior citizens getting ganked and jacked, bank accounts being siphoned and all in the name of societies’ growing gadget obsession or addiction to gadgets, gizmos and gear.
I’d say that these are at the very least good signals that its time for a reality check.
Smartphones have emerged as status symbols among peer pressure conscious teens and are the key to modern business communications among aspiring entrepreneurs of all ages and classes.
I remain uncertain as to whether any of this is either healthy or useful but I do know that this is the world we inhabit. And we need to be more careful and aware of things in the real world as well as in the virtual world. We used to be able to judge the status of others by simply observing their clothing or their shoes, now the sophistication of the gear they carry tells us much more than any other single indicator. A man with an iPhone 4 trumps a Blackberry owner. An iPad user outranks a netbook user, and so on.
American homes are burning valuable energy supplying juice to all the computers, media players and electronic devices we plug in.
It is not too late to call out our obsessions addictions when they appear too consuming or destructive.
