Maybe it’s just me. Maybe everyone else uses technology flawlessly and all of the sources of new technologies work for everyone…except me. If it is just me then I’d like to vent my frustration and, perhaps, someone will come forward to help.
I think it’s a sham. I think we have programmed ourselves into believing all of the new technologies work, when, in fact, they don’t. Everything in business, from finance to advertising, is now predicated on Smart Phones, computers, tablets, wi-fi, internet access, search engines, analytics, and Big Data sources. We’re told that they all work.
They don’t.
Oh, sure, they work most of the time, but not ALL of the time. Yet, messaging, analytic research, events, and programs, operate on the assumption that the technology is flawless and it will accumulate, download and distribute whatever we need as it’s supposed to.
It doesn’t.
This morning as I downloaded Facebook onto my Nook (I know…Nooks are old news), the green bar across the top that tells me when the download is complete, only went about two thirds of the way. It does that fairly often. No idea why. So I powered off then on to reset my tablet. This time I got on, but whenever I put the cursor in the message box, the thread would scroll to the bottom of the page and I’d have to navigate back up for every letter I hit. So I restarted again.
Even though the shut-down-re-start-sequence probably only takes a minute, minutes seem longer these days.
Yesterday, my cellphone shut down (it had a full battery). For no apparent reason, it will do that now and again. Once in happened in the middle of a long adventure of navigating through those automatic “Press One for….etc” options, and I’d gotten about 4 levels into where I wanted to go to “talk with a sales representative” when I had to start over.
I was using the Bluetooth function in my car and when I turned the phone back on to start over, I was apparently driving through a “dead zone” with no bars and couldn’t get through.
I have this idea for a zombie movie called “Dead Zone” where zombies have taken over all customer service call centers….or is that already a reality?
I have a computer in the basement where I use a wi-fi connection, and because of some flare from the sun (or so I’m told), it wouldn’t get online for about an hour.
My computer at work froze the other day for an hour. Someone sent a message to the entire company with too many bytes and our email collapsed.
Twitter had too many “tweets” coming in on Monday and had to shut down for a while.
Even my Hotmail account said, “Temporarily unavailable for service. Try again later.”
I get so much Spam these days that legitimate emails often get caught in my filter and friends get angry because I haven’t responded.
Now, don’t get me wrong!- I use all of this technology! Constantly. I email, text, tweet, Google, share, IM, and Facebook like a teenager- 
but I also suffer a new kind of anxiety that didn’t exist when I actually was a teenager. It is the anxiety caused by the impatience that is a result of not receiving what I EXPECT. I expect instant access to information because that is what I’ve been told that I can (and must) expect.
We are told that every new Smart Phone, search engine, social network, Big Data accumulating and analyzing tool, is the bleeding edge of technology and that it is the new standard everyone has to use if they want to be up to date, in the moment, to lead, follow, create, manufacture, and disseminate, whether in a club, on the plane, in a boat, on a house, over a moat, or with a mouse.
It isn’t.
We landed on the moon using the calculations that came from a slide rule! We brought back three astronauts in a broken ship from a lunar orbit, using that slide rule. There were no cellphones, or even answering machines.
A hungry engineer couldn’t even run to an ATM to get money to buy a cheeseburger.
The computer on Apollo 13 had 1 RAM that ran on coded tape.
I’m not saying that the speed and relative efficiency of modern technology isn’t a good thing, but I’m asking this: Is it always better?
I don’t think so. But maybe that’s just me.
