The marvels of technology

I bought my first smart phone today. It's a Motorola Android and it can do everything except tuck you into bed at night if you know how to use it. And that's somewhat of a problem, especially for older guys like me that were raised in a non-technological world. I'm sure the geeks who invented this phone and other brands like it called it the smart phone because it does so many remarkable things. I call it a smart phone because you have to be pretty darn techno smart to figure out how to use it.

When I say it does everything, I'm not exaggerating by much. It has a Google map on it that allows you to see down a street so clearly that you can read the tag numbers on the cars parked along the curb and these pictures were taken from satellites in space. And that's any street, anywhere in the world. If you and I have access to something as technologically advanced as that, think about what they have that we don't know about yet. I'm no conspiracy theories but, heck, they can probably see in our houses.

It has full Internet access, g-mail, a GPS that gives you voice commands on finding any address in the world, thousands of downloadable ringtones, and Facebook comes already installed. It has an apps market where you can download any of a thousand different applications. It has a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock and both a still camera that takes brilliant, crystal-clear pictures and a video camera that is just as good.

Those are just the things I've discovered in my first day of ownership and I'm sure there are many more yet to be found. And, by the way, the phone works too.

This phone captures for me the disconnect we're experiencing in the world we live in. While we continue to advance technologically by leaps and bounds, politically and socially we're perhaps regressing. President George H.W. Bush spoke in 1988 of his desire for a kinder, gentler nation but that desire didn't see fruition. We're as fractured politically as a country as we've ever been. There's no working towards the common good; there's no compromise; there's no one saying "You might be right" or "I might be wrong." And there's real, gut-wrenching hate and animosity among Americans toward other Americans if they happen to disagree politically with your views. The overriding reason for every war we've fought in this country has been to protect the freedoms we enjoy as Americans but now that freedom exists only if you believe in the same things I do. I think that's an American tragedy and I hope we fix it before it's too late.

We certainly have the ability to be far-sighted instead of short-sighted. We have the ability to look to the future with hope and optimism rather than digging our feet into the ground and insisting on our way or the highway. In that respect, our technological thinkers are leaps ahead of our political and social thinkers because they see the world in terms of possibilities rather than limitations and the way we think about the world is the way we live IN the world.

One of the emails that is forwarded frequently talks about the way things used to be and they're always fun to read because they come in so many different forms. People over 60 remember party lines, operators you told the number you were calling and they connected you, sometimes telling you that the person you were calling was on vacation and wouldn't be back for two weeks. They remember black and white televisions with antennas on the roof that, if you were lucky, received all three broadcast channels. They remember ice houses, ice boxes and the informal community network of "spies" that made it impossible to get away with anything when you were a kid because your parents would know about it before you got home. They remember corded phones, long before cell phones or even cordless phones made their way to the marketplace. They remember un-air-conditioned houses with attic fans that circulated air through the house on hot summer nights if you left the front and back doors open and un-air- conditioned cars too.

All these things came rushing back into my consciousness as I sat here trying to figure out this technological marvel in my hands. A telephone, a computer, a Web browser, a GPS, a camera, a video recorder, and a CD player, all wrapped up in an incredible device no larger than a cigarette package. It's almost beyond comprehension the technological progress we've made over the past 50 years and what's going to happen in the next 50 years that we haven't even dreamed of yet.

The technological advances would be worth sticking around for. The political and social climate that currently exists wouldn't.