The Sad Reality

There are many technologies and mediums that shape my everyday life but I would have to say the most important one to me is My Cell Phone. One of the scariest things I believe can happen to me is if my cell phone were to break or get lost. My cell phone is my link to everyone I know. Since I am away at school, if something were to happen to my cell phone, I would have no way to verbally talk to the people who mean the most to me. I find it kind of funny that something so small can have such a big impact on my life.

My cell phone is in my life from the minute I get up, it is first used as my alarm clock. The second thing I do after I get up is check my cell phone and see if I missed a call or a text message. For the rest of the day, I am constantly checking and using it to communicate with my friends. If I don’t have my cell phone, I am lost for the rest of the day, wondering who is trying to get a hold of me. I’m not going to lie, from time to time I will stop paying attention in class and return a text message. I’m not proud of it but I have just become so attached to it. My cell phone has totally changed the way I act around people, if I’m talking to one of my friends and I get a text message I immediately start ignoring them and read the text. I know its rude and I’m not really sure when people began to think that just because your cell phone rang or you got a text message that it is socially acceptable to ignore what you were already doing, but we all have done this at some point.

As Marshall McLuhan explained, "The electric media are the telegraph, radio, films, telephone, computer and television, all of which have not only extended a single sense or function as the old mechanical media did--i.e., the wheel as an extension of the foot, clothing as an extension of the skin, the phonetic alphabet as an extension of the eye--but have enhanced and externalized our entire central nervous systems, thus transforming all aspects of our social and psychic existence." Technologies are what occupy the majority of our lives, we don’t use the same senses as we use to, we are all surrounded by our forms of electronic entertainment- nothing else matters to us as long as we have our technologies everything will be okay.

My cell phone is a part of me; it’s an extension of me. Sad but true, this appears to be the future.

Till the next time,

Sarah Young

Works Cited

Playboy, "The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan." Playboy Magazine March 1969. 28 Sep 2008. <http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~gisle/links/mcluhan/pb.html>.