In this day and age, we are living and breathing technology to the point where almost everyone owns an iPod; and if they do not own an iPod, then they own some other high tech mp3 player. Recently, I was driving in my father s Nissan Maxima. I watched in slight fascination as he used some sort of fingerprint technology to open his door and then, without a key, he again used just his finger to push a button to start the car. Unbelievable.
I can still remember a time when we had a tan rotary phone in our house. It was positioned downstairs on the nightstand by the couch, and that is the phone that I learned how to memorize my grandmother s phone number on. Still, to this day, I remember her lengthy phone number, and I credit it to the fact that we had this rotary phone which demanded that you wait after circling each number. We then procured a cordless phone (another fascinating object), but not before we used a corded telephone to make our calls. I remember how we had this corded phone in the kitchen. It was white and had the longest cord ever. Any time that I wanted to make a phone call or receive a phone call, I would run to my room down the hallway with the cord in tow. There wasn t any real privacy with corded phones because someone always knew where you were by following the cord. I m sure that parents loved this fact!
Nowadays, however, with the birth of cellular technology, GPS systems, dvds, cds and mp3s, do we have too many technological devices in our cars? More importantly, should there be more bans on the sorts of technological items that should or shouldn t be allowed into a vehicle? I almost feel as if people have forgotten what it was like to once live in a world where it was still cool and normal to use a pay phone. Nowadays, if you have to use a pay phone, it s almost embarrassing, like somehow you are admitting that you are lower on the totem pole than everyone else because you have to resort to using a public telephone. So, when did we become ashamed of these things?
Driving is distracting enough as it is. I certainly do not think that we need the added help of modern technology to make us that much more distracted to sort of will us into not paying attention quite as much as we should. What is it about technology that draws us to use it in them wrong situations such as when we are behind the wheel of a moving automobile? The next time you think about adding another gadget to your vehicle, think of the practicality behind it: When will you have the occasion to use it? Will it be distracting and/or detract from my ability to drive my vehicle in a safe manner? These are some things definitely worth considering. After all, if you were to see someone on the highway with a million or so gadgets inside of their vehicle, how would you react?