Smart Devices/​Consumers Not So Much

So I walked into my favorite cof­fee-shop today, the same Dunkin-Donut I vis­it on my way to work dai­ly, except when my wife makes me a cup of cof­fee. The line was long, sur­pris­ing for a Sunday afternoon.

No one seemed to be in a rush, after all it’s lazy Sunday, not exact­ly the Monday morn­ing rush crowd.

As I stood in line wait­ing, I real­ized that most of the peo­ple on-line had their smart phones out, no prob­lem of course. Not at all, peo­ple need some­thing to occu­py their time while they wait. 

What irri­tat­ed me a bit, was real­iz­ing that the rea­son I was  in the same place with­out mov­ing was that the guy giv­ing his order at the head of the line was try­ing to find his order in his smart device. It got me thinking.

There is real­ly noth­ing wrong with using a smart device to store your infor­ma­tion, not at all. What is a prob­lem, is when the device becomes your brain. Am I alone in think­ing that as the devices become smarter ‚many on the con­sumer end are becom­ing less so?

Okay, you are skep­ti­cal, but when you inter­act with the pub­lic dai­ly you get a feel for what I am actu­al­ly talk­ing about. People with smart Devices, unable to tell their phone num­ber. Unable to tell their Cell and inter­net provider. Unable to tell how much they pay each month. That’s a problem.

Not only are peo­ple unable to mem­o­rize the most basic per­son­al infor­ma­tion, it seems we are less able to make sim­ple deci­sions. The pur­chase of a sin­gle piece of Electronic device has to be pho­tographed, a thou­sand ques­tions asked and that infor­ma­tion beamed across hun­dreds ‚some­times thou­sands of miles of Oceans sev­er­al time before a pur­chas­ing deci­sion can be made.

I got to won­der­ing what would hap­pen if we go off-line for a day, make that a week ?It’s not out of the realm of what’s pos­si­ble, tech­nol­o­gy depends on Satellites being in place with­out inter­fer­ence. Properly func­tion­ing Networks deliv­er Data to us at record speed, so much so we for­get to use our Brains as a stor­age device. What if some­thing hap­pens which caus­es all of that free-flow of Data to come to a sud­den stop, what then?

Just a thought !