Planetina

Smart phone, smart watch, smart board, smart user… hm… wait a minute, I haven’t seen or heard the last expression yet. What happened to this specie? Does homo smartuserus actually exist?

Who or what can we call “smart”? If you have watched the movie Forest Gump than you know, that being smart or stupid is a relative thing depending on your actions. So can you be smart if you have a device that is thinking instead of you? For example navigation system… it is telling you when to turn left or right and is guiding you to reach your destination. If you wouldn’t be able to reach it without it, would that make you stupid?

Nowadays the society is getting more and more disconnected from the real world, since our senses that are connecting the mind and the body with the environment are occupied by virtual world. Most people have earphones plugged in their ears and nervously checking the screen, so here go two senses out of five. Is it really necessary to check the phone that often? Will you miss something if you check it once you get home? Why does our brain have to be occupied every god damn second? If you knew that your brain needs a lot of time to order so much information that it gets, maybe you would give it a break and rather disconnect for a while. I am even not surprised of the drastic increase of mentally disorders that is happening. Have you heard about hikikomori? I will just say that the word has Japanese roots, but to get the meaning use your browser.

Personally I’m an old fashion lady trying to stay connected to the real world, so I don’t posses a smart phone. I’m a happy Sony Ericsson txt pro user that is now at least five years old. What I love about this phone is that it is robust, it still works after falling down plenty of times, the battery life is incredible, I need to charge it just once per week and the best feature ever… the keyboard, damn this is just awesome. It doesn’t have apps, but this is not a disadvantage, because I don’t want my brain to get lazy, I enjoy using it. It is just forcing me to be more sociable and creative, so if I get lost, I need to look for people and ask for help.

I don’t have internet access, so I am disconnected, but this can lead to great advantage like while waiting for my flight at the Shanghai airport. There I met two nice guys at the internet corner, because we tried to connect to the virtual world, but weren’t able to. We started to talking until our planes flew to different locations. At the end the internet disconnection was responsible for creating a real connection.

The irony about smart phones is that everybody is saying smart phone, but nobody says smart user…. so I rather interact with a smart human than a smart phone.