President Obama has helped make the ubiquitous Black-Berry a cause ce'lebre. He, like millions of other stay-in-touch movers & shakers, finds this amazing pocket communicator indispensable. Not owning one, I take everyone's word for that. Only is it possible to find in this very indispensability today's grievous problem with dispensability....?
Let me explain, at the cost of sounding hopelessly calcified in some lost layer of time.
From what I have seen, the amazing Black-Berry -- like all today's computerized memory banks -- can delete faster than it can include. To include a piece of information or a name requires some moments of concentrated effort. Thought... open...click... click ....close. To delete same needs only a single (perhaps even thoughtless or accidental) click. Doesn't that have to give one pause? And please don't tell me about "all data is saved somewhere in the system," for I am not talking about digital systems but about human memories.
For some time, critics have indicted ours as a throw-away culture. Until our great recession, that was all too easy to admit and then ignore. Now, however, as we look through the shambles of that culture, we have compelling reason to re-consider much of what we have been so blithely throwing away. Money...caution....prudence...ethics....and most of all people.
When cultures collapse, the survivors get a second chance to get their priorities straight. Such as the people they have been raised by and with, have known and worked for, have shared and benefited from. In my calcified lifetime, these precious lives usually found their way into a telephone book. Like the old, tattered one Joan and I find impossible to part with.
It sits there on its kitchen shelf like an graying King Lear on his aging throne. It is a fading repository of all those names and numbers that have be-jeweled the crown of our lives together, and we proudly refuse to depose a single one of them!
I remember my sainted Mother pausing over her book at age 92 and sighing, "Nobody's left but me...." Had she a sparklingly efficient delete button at her disposal, I can assure you it would never have been clicked. Disposability was not high on her priority list. Nor is it on ours. Lives that have been part of us simply cannot be so discarded. And so each of these names of our lives shall yellow and age on their throne right along with Joan and me.
By the way, among those names may be some of you....
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I hear you Jack. In my quest to bring our high school class back together I wonder why did I lose touch with so many of them and how great it was to hear their voices again. OR 3-6255 is a number etched in my brain. Dec. 10, 2001 is a date that is likewise etched. The phone number of my best friend and the date he passed away. I still have a calendar on my office wall of that terrible date.
ReplyDeleteBlackberry... sends a chill up my spine just thinking (and having actually seen one!) about all the things it is capable of... my sister Christine just got one at the insistance of her husband Ryan who cannot live without his... he traveled a bit! So she spent one evening going through the "book" on how to work the darned thing... I think she got my number in there!!
ReplyDeleteBut only time will tell... I too have a tattered phone book on my shelf that I refuse to part with! And was very sad when my older ones got a tad wet during a couple of flooded basement episodes and had to be thrown out... what memories they hold! Love you both...
Keith, Claudia, I think I hear some echoes of support. Great, because as wonderful as our technology is, there ARE trade-offs. And it seems to make sense that users consider them before they just scoop up the latest hot widget for them and their kids. Some blog readers tell me that's being a Luddite or an Amish about progress. I always ask them how do they define progress...
ReplyDelete