Power in my pocket

It’s Saturday morning, I’m not at work and I have the world in my pocket, a device so powerful that I could never imagined having only a few years ago, a device that allows me to do things and go places that stretch my horizons to the very edge of humanity.  I have more places to visit on my smart phone than there are stars in our galaxy and I have more people that I am connected to than there were alive when I was born only half a century ago.

First thing I checked out a couple of emails that had come in over night, sales stuff and news groups, then I used the Spanish dictionary application as I am kidding myself that I am learning a foreign language.  I travelled to Poland and the Ukraine to catch up on the football that was to be played today (Netherlands against Denmark, a local derby, followed by Germany against Portugal) and then France to see about the tennis (women’s finals day) and the cycling at the Dauphine (Bradley Wiggins still has a thirty eight second lead).

I used it to look up a word in English that I’d never come across before, protean; readily assuming different forms or characters; extremely variable and then I tweeted an interesting fact that I came across in the book I had started to read, the same one that had used the word I didn’t know.  I used the calculator to do a quick division.  I checked my diary to see what I was doing at the weekend coming and sent a text to a friend to agree where we would meet up before putting an entry into my calendar about an upcoming event at the end of July, a Viking longboat sailing down the Tyne.   Of course I also update the details of where we were meeting once he had replied.

I checked out a map to see how to get to Edinburgh for a trip I was planning and then responded to an email from a group I had been working with to get broadband into their village.  It was good news on that front, something to celebrate in fact and so I emailed a colleague suggesting a press release was in order.  Finally I had a look at my wordpress account to see if anyone had read my latest blog though I can’t explain why I felt that this was necessary.  By this time it was lunch.

I used to think of my smart phone as a novelty, a toy that would be useful from time to time and keep me amused but it has become so much more, it has become an integral part of the way that I live my life.  I know that I am not alone, there are millions if not billions of you out there just getting on with the revolution.

There is more reality in the virtual world now than in the real world.  Reality has become a mere prototype for what will happen in the digital environment.  I have such power in my pocket but the revolution in digital technologies has only just begun, we really have no concept of where it will take us.  We are not living in the technical age we are only at its beginning and at the dawn of an exciting and immense era for the whole of mankind.