How Technology Creeps into Everyday Existence to Become Ubiquitous

Let’s roll back our minds a decade to a time when people were not constantly on their smartphones.  Facebook isn’t in our everyday lives for another two years and Twitter will hatch a year after that in 2006.

Smartphones aren’t even called smartphones — they’re just dumb “cellular phones” that do rudimentary text messages without multimedia attachments like images and video.

That barren time in technology was still a difficult one of wide, generational, gaps when it came to the rapid, everyday, adoption of technology.

Those of us who grew up on payphones and single-line telephones in the home, were often put off, and perhaps, even offended by the younger among us who insisted that their cellphones were not just extensions of communication, but a very connectoid of being human.

When I was teaching at a major technical university on the East Coast way back when, I implored my students to not just put their phones on vibrate — at that time in the technological evolution, the vibration of the mechanism in the phone was just as loud as a ringtone — but to actually turn off their phones during the few times other students were giving a formal, graded, presentation in class.

Continue reading → How Technology Creeps into Everyday Existence to Become Ubiquitous

The Driving Danger Dyad

We now have scientific evidence that talking on the phone while driving is more dangerous than chatting with the person in the car with you:

Continue reading → The Driving Danger Dyad

Sleeping with Your Cell Phone

Over the last couple of years I have done an informal survey over the web. This survey is not scientific, but it is telling, and over 361 students between the ages of 15-22 and provided these results:

Continue reading → Sleeping with Your Cell Phone

Budapest Bus Number Eight

by Noemi Szadeczky-Kardoss

Bus Number Eight shudders to a halt at its final stop at Gazdagrét and gives a big sigh.

“Pssssssssshhhhhh,” he says and opens his doors.

His passengers clamber down the steep stairs. One of them, an old lady carrying a large basket, heads for the grocery store across the street. Two young mothers with strollers and gurgling babies help each other get off the bus, then walk towards the park hiding among the eleven-storied apartment blocks.

Continue reading → Budapest Bus Number Eight