Phone Hostage
Last weekend I woke up and my phone didn't. It was dead. Kaput. Bricked. The night before, when I tried to access it, it would shut off as quickly as I turned it on. It was behaving badly. Facebook was wonky too. It would open, then close saying "Sorry, Facebook can't start," or some such message of hopelessness. It was a nearly 4 year old Samsung Galaxy S6. I loved the phone, it rarely gave me problems and despite a battery that died halfway through the day, it worked pretty flawlessly. I had the oldest phone in my family, so was due for an upgrade anyway. Now, understand that I have a love/hate relationship with these things, more hate than love, frankly. I think as a culture we've created devices of distraction and disconnection. There is a wonderful photo journalism article in The Sun magazine by Gianpaolo La Paglia that captures peoples' obsessions with their phones quite well. I feel that we've gone down a path we can't get back up...