Discourse on Technology

If one had told the flappers of the 1920s that, one day, a little brick-shaped piece of technology would be available to hold up to their ear, through which they would be able to hear a friend or relative who resided in another time zone in the US, they might have told you that such a thing would only be a product of alien intelligence.  Well, this day has come and passed, and the cell phone has now become an indispensable and cherished artifact of the bulk of American citizens, as well as those of most other countries of the world.  Even those who were fully conscious during the early 90s might have thought an idea that a cellular phone would be in the hands of hundreds of thousands would be crazy.  I remember the advent of the popular usage of the cell phone as strange; seeing someone walk through the mall, holding this little piece of metal and plastic up to their heads, appearing as though they were crazy and talking to themselves, especially if you only caught the side of their face which was not glued to the Nokia's surface.  Then came the touch-screen.  After having been a proud owner of the first iPhone for almost a year now, I take it for granted that I can access the internet from anywhere which is serviced by a cell tower, this power enabling me to discover a plethora of knowledge at the peak of my interest at will.  Gone are the days which were characterized by the need to visit a local library to find the [often-outdated] statistic of the population of some random African country; now, I can have such a wanton need to know the ethanol production of Burma and, from the comfort of a moving motor vehicle, discover the fairly-current figure, right on this wireless piece of glass and metal.  Every so often, I'll stop in the middle of typing in the Google search text field in Safari on my iPhone and really THINK about what the fuck it is I'm doing...my fingers are simply touching designated areas of this glass screen, somehow delineating to a foreign source that I wish to search for something; simply hitting "search" yields back, wirelessly, the product of my query.