So a couple of months ago Chris and I faced a sad reality. We are nearly helpless with out our technology to augment us. The following is a recount of my fall into digital dependency and the realization that it's a problem
Super Watch
For me it started in my freshman year of high school. I had purchased a Timex Data-Link watch. It could store: names, numbers, memos, appointments, and had a few alarms, no chronograph not water resistant. But It was the first of my digital crutches. I used it to store names and corresponding phone numbers, peoples locker combinations, and had considered using it to store test answers as well, as nobody would suspect the watch. Later I would upgrade to the Ironman version of the watch which had a chronograph and was water resistant. The watch was really ideal it was ubiquitous. It was there with me at all times I never gave it a thought unless I needed information from it which was easy to retrieve.
The downside to the watch was syncing the watch at a regular basis to keep all the information current. Or to trim information to make room for new information but none of that took very long or much work.
The watch had saved me once or twice though. A friend and I were going on a short road-trip one summer to Southern Oregon. We visited his grandmother and his uncle in Medford before we set off to go camping near the Illinois river. Well the camping area wasn't what it had been now in our brief time in the area we witnessed people getting into fights and others looking for stuff that had been stolen from them. So once we got back into town and to a Pay Phone I looked up my Uncle Randy on my watch called him and arranged to hang out there for our remaining night or two of the trip.
Later I would lose the same watch on another camping trip near the Rouge River whiles running around in the woods of the trails. However the band was broken and the watch was partly hanging out of a pouch on my backpack I should have put it in my pocket.
The Palms
Later I would get a Palm IIIe for something like $50. This was uber. I could enter people and their numbers, addresses, email addresses etc directly into the the device and sync them later, whereas with the watches they had to be in the computer first then sent to the watch. Not to mention the calender and the to-do list and memos also done by the palms. Also the Palm could run applications and those could do things like control TVs, VCRs, Etc. The palms could also send data to other devices and other Palm devices which a couple of my friends had so we could simply beam contact information, memos, and games to each other. While the device was still fairly small it was a bit more work to use. You either used the crappy on screen keyboard or learned the special shorthand writing style to input data so data entry could be cumbersome.
The data input wasn't the only cumbersome thing about owning a hand-held. Here we have a device thats small enough to fit in to most pockets but it's made of plastic, glass, bits of metal and a couple batteries. If it were to fall out of said pocket and the batteries were to pop out for more than a couple seconds all your data was gone hopefully you had a synced it with your PC recently. There was a rigid plastic cover for the screen on the IIIe. It didn't protect the screen from the all 165ish pounds of me sitting on it and destroying the screen rendering the device utterly useless.
For a while I carried the Palm and my watch. This became especially difficult to keep both information stores consistent as the programs did not share a database and the palm had much more storage space and many more fields for contact information than the watch. So often the watch had a number the palm didn't cause I it was already in the watch and I just never put it in the palm and vise versa. After I lost the watch I just carried a Palm until I got a cellphone then I carried both.
The Phone and Palm Era
After I graduated and got my first job, at hell, I got a phone. I had one briefly a year or more prior to this but I kept breaking them and as I didn't have a job I couldn't afford to keep replacing them. Anyways my phone was the Nokia 6190 at the time it was one of the nicest phones voice-stream offered (now t-mobile). It had a calendar, phone book and alarms. But data entry was even more of a pain than the Palm IIIe because it all had to be done with the stupid keypad on the phone.
Again I ran into the problem of not having some data in the palm that was in the phone and vise versa. Not a new problem and as long as I had the data I didn't care much.
But now is when I really started to decline and become helpless. The numbers that were in the phone were only entered once by me or maybe even someone else. With the watches and the palms I still had to dial a regular phone from time to time to make the call so I'd sometimes memorize a number of a frequently called friend. No longer was this the case once they called me I had their number I no longer had to even input the number I'd just save it and attach a name to it. I recall making someone's name DO NOT ANSWER who exactly I don't recall but I've got a pretty good idea of who it was.
By the time I was working for the community college in Salem the phone tended to store the numbers friends and the Palm kept work contacts and information like passwords, schedules, etc as well as a few games and a mobile offline browser called avantgo. So the Palm was also for entertainment when whatever games on the phone I currently had wouldn't cut it.
I went though several phones and palms. Most of which were voluntary upgrades, rather than "oops! Guess I'm gonna have to get a new one".
Currently
I have a converged device. It does everything. Internet, email, contact list, memos, to-do, etc etc. While this is the ultimate in digital crutches I can just look at it and know what I'm doing tomorrow and it beeps to remind me when I'm due for a meeting or something else and it syncs with outlook so all my stuff can be in one place and usable/accessible in the office or at home or on my phone. Very handy and convenient. Not as cumbersome as carrying two devices I just keep it on my hip and try not to lose the stylus or break the screen. So far I've managed to not break the screen or lose the stylus. It has a slide out keyboard so data input is easy.
The Realization
Chris and I had have both spoken of how dependent we are on our devices and how we use them to augment our own memories and such. Chris' story is similar to mine he had a watch like mine, he has had a couple palm devices too, and also now on a converged device. We knew we were dependent but never had a problem with it until a couple months ago.
A couple months ago Chris invited me to go scuba diving at Edmonds Underwater park with him, his Dad, and his Brother. So I went. Chris and I left our phones in his car. Chris left his key's in the back of his Dad's truck. We had planned for 2 dives that day. But Chris' Dad and Brother were on a time constraint so Chris and I went down for our 2nd dive and we had been told that everyone would still be at the park when we were finished with our dive. We surfaced and swam to shore. No truck... No keys.
Here we have our problem. Chris doesn't know his Dad's cellphone number. So even if we could get to a phone it wouldn't matter, because we don't know the number. After five or so minutes of searching around the car for the keys and not finding them we start to worry, dare I say start to panic. I suggested Chris go to the dive shop where his dad rented some gear prior to the dive and get the number from them as they collect that kind of thing when you rent gear. So Chris goes and calls his dad from the shop. He told us where the keys were, which we had already checked the particular spot but just not well enough apparently cause they were right there where he said.
It was scary. Stranded in Washington with our money, phones, and belongings locked in Chris' car. All we had was our wet wetsuits and some scuba gear. Had Chris' dad not rented gear and left the keys we may have had bigger problems.
Have we done anything about this problem? No.
I've come up with a few possible solutions.