Let’s talk about it

Confession: Yesterday I called my daughter Sabrina on her cell phone.

She was in the house. Downstairs. I was in the house. Upstairs.

All right, mea culpa. But there are a lot of stairs. The twins, 14, had their music on and their door closed. I was in a hurry and she is on my speed dial, and I use an ear piece. There is no doubt that it was faster to call than to walk downstairs, knock, wait for them to hear the knock, and tell her to come up and see the mountains as the sun rose. She is trying to paint those mountains.

Yes, I called her on her cell phone to come up and look at the view.

But then I started to think about this turn of events. Perhaps what I did is really just the squeezing of inefficiencies by technology, as technology is intended to do.

For some six months I have been among the ranks of those who no longer have a land line. Instantly I can name of four others close to me who no longer have a tether to Ma Bell or any of her children, although one of them has a land line linked to his cell phone in a way I don’t understand. In my case, I have no land link at all, since I don’t get cable or DSL. Everything is wireless by some form of technology standard, WiMax or WiFi or Bluetooth or cell.

In other words, I no longer have a phone. I have a Star Trek communicator. Instead of a hand held device or a badge on my breast like Jean Luc Picard, I have a dongle in my left ear (the hearing in the right a little dim from shotgun reports or rock and roll or the finish grind barrel at the cement plant where I worked eons ago).

And with free family to family minutes, it is more efficient and less costly to tap my left ear twice and ask my daughter to come up stairs. In the 50s and 60s there were intercoms. Stand at a box in the wall of the kitchen and talk to a bedroom. Now I tap my ear and talk to my daughter.

We are on the cusp of being able to do the same upstairs to downstairs, Hawaii to New York, with voice or image, with mass amounts of data on the internet or simply a reference to commonly accessed URL’s.

It’s not a telephone, it’s a communicator. It will soon interface the personal area network (earpiece, iPod, Bluetooth) with the local area network (my house, my printer, my computer) and the wide area network (the internet, my office, you).

And because technology puts the squeeze on inefficiency (while introducing a few of its own, ask any homebuilder watching hourly subs on their cell phones), it will replace the old methods, as surely as it is difficult now to find a typewriter.