We have had lots of ages: Ice age, Iron Age, Industrial age, post Industrial age, information age... so what’s next?
The historians who look back on the time that we have now, I think they will call it the age of interruption.
We allowed ourselves to be hypnotised and transfixed by interruption in such as short period of time and it became ingrained in our culture and in our being.
Imagine this - in 2008 I didn’t own a smart phone and in the following 9 years it has become something in many peoples lives, something which is more important that their families or health.
Take peoples reaction when they have lost their phone; they show genuine grief at the loss of a small electrical item which provides them, most of the time, nothing but an interruption to otherwise wonderful things.
What a great trick it was to invent a device to convince us to carry it with us everywhere so that it could interrupt us at every opportunity offering to sell us more devices or more things from the same device manufacturer (app store, iTunes etc.) It was like Kay’s catalogue convincing me that at all times you had to carry a catalogue around with you and 10p to put in the pay phones so that at any opportunity you had you could buy another pair of trousers. The smart phone was sold to us initially as a time saving device and then as a device of connectivity. Here is an interesting question... how many people think that they have more time to do things they want to do now than when they didn’t have a smart phone?
Apart from some isolated incidents where the fact that I have a smart phone has brought me joys and allowed me to find things I would have otherwise not come across, invariably it is a tool for people to interrupt me to try to sell me something in the loosest possible sense. It gives people the opportunity to ask me to do things for them and only one source of this distraction is spam emails.
I was sitting beside my sister in law on Sunday at my mother in law's house where we go for dinner each week and she was laughing with me showing me some of the spam emails that she gets. The most hilarious one was the one offering her ‘Russian women ready to meet her as soon as she would like’.
What will come after the age of interruption? I’ve said for ages that I think we're passing through an age, a fashion of the smart phone. The next generation or the generation after that will not want a smart phone at all. I have three children, 15, 13 and 9. My oldest uses Facebook, my 13 year old uses Instagram (she doesn’t want to use Facebook because her sister is on it) but mostly she uses snap chat because too many older people are on Instagram anyway. My son doesn’t have a phone yet, although he uses an old one as an Ipod (much to my disappointment at many stages) What is interesting though is that my 13 year old is realising that when she has her phone we can contact her, and 13 year olds don’t like that!
I don't think we're a long way away from a situation where people begin to realise that the price of being contactable is too great a price to pay for the convenience of having a smart phone with us at every opportunity.
Blog Post Number - 1307
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