Postman

4

English 100

Change. What is change? The dictionary says change is “to make different.” Just about everything changes at one point or another. People change, the times change, ideas change, and the list goes on. One thing that continuously changes and makes a huge impact on our lives is technology. Technological change has such a huge impact on us; there are people who dedicate their life’s work to study how this specific change affects our lives. One man who has done just that is Neil Postman. Postman spent 30 years studying the history of technological change. In 1998, he gave a speech on this topic: “Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change.” In this speech, he explains 5 ideas.
Postman’s first idea is that for every advantage a new technology offers, there is also going to be a disadvantage. His second idea is that the advantages and disadvantages of a new technology are never distributed evenly among the people. There are going to be winners and there are going to be losers within the technology. Postman’s third idea is embedded in every technology; there is a powerful idea, sometimes 2 or 3 ideas. His fourth idea is technology doesn’t just change one person, or one culture, or even one country. It changes everything, everyone who uses it, and everyone that is connected to the person using it. One technology can change how the whole world operates. Postman’s last idea was that media or technology could be given a mythic status. He talks about how something can become so big and popular, it is almost considered “God-given.” As if that technology was a part of nature. I have chosen to write about the cell phone for this paper because I believe it is on the way to be given this status.
From the time of its invention, the cell phone has progressed at an extreme rate. In less than 40 years, the cell phone went from a primitive talking tool, to a powerful, multi tasking, futuristic communication device. According to the article “Cell Phone History”, Dr. Martin Cooper invented the first cell phone in 1973. He was the former General Manager for the system division at Motorola; he was also the first person to make a phone call on a cell phone. The phone was called the Motorola Dyna-Tac; it was 9 inches long, 5 inches wide, and 1.5 thick and weighed 2.5 pounds. It didn’t have any kind of display. The battery could only handle 35 minutes of talk time and took 10 hours to charge. The only capable functions were dialing, talking, and listening.
In January, I purchased a new cell phone; it is the HTC Droid Eris. HTC’s website list its specs as being 4.45 inches long, 2.19 inches wide, 0.51 inches thick, and only weighs 4.23 ounces. It has a 3.2-inch display that has 320x480 HVGA resolution and touch screen. The battery will last for 214 minutes of talk time and only takes 2-3 hours to charge. Not only has the size improved, but also the features of the phone are far beyond that of just talking. New cell phones, known as “smart phone” are now capable of handing process as powerful as a laptop. Cell phones can now be used for GPS navigation, emails, text messages, including picture, video, and audio messages. They also have access to the Internet, so it can be used to surf the web, and view Facebook and Twitter. It can be used as a MP3 player, calendar and an alarm clock. And this isn’t even mentioning the thousands of applications that can be downloaded.
The Droid is a great phone, but only after 6 months of being on the market, its production has already been discontinued. This shows how fast cell phone technology is advancing. The phone that is taking the place of the Droid Eris is the HTC Droid Incredible. It’s practically the same phone, but with a bigger and better screen and double the processing power. Along with the technology advancing, the annual revenue of cell phones in general is advancing at an amazing rate. 25 years ago, cells phones produced revenue annually of only 3 million dollars; today that number has increased to 30 billion dollars a year (Cell Phone History).
In Postman’s first idea he says for every advantage a new technology has, it also has a disadvantage. One advantage of the cell phone is, they make communicating with other people easier and more accessible. A person no longer has to wait till they get home or use a public pay phone to call someone. We can now call or text anyone we want, whenever and wherever. The disadvantage to that would be, now anyone can get a hold of you whenever they want to. This can be very distracting to some people. Not everyone likes to be called while at work or while trying to eat dinner with the family. As I mentioned, cell phones can also send text messages, these are usually short and quick messages sent instead of making a call. This can be seen as an advantage because it could save time and also save money, due to not having to use allotted minutes. The disadvantage to this would be people are starting to use text messaging as a main source of communicating. This is taking away from face to face contact and it is chopping up the way we talk to each other. Teenagers are now using acronyms as words and they are losing important writing skills, they will need in school and in the future.
Postman’s second idea was with every new technology there are going to be winners and losers. When it comes to cell phone technology, the big phone companies are obviously winning, and the public is losing. Cell phone companies are making a ridiculous amount of money off the public because we rely so much on our phones and the need we have developed for them. The Cell phone companies continue to raise their monthly fees and they continue to make it more expensive and difficult to break their long contracts. Verizon even shows their annual revenue being 62.1 billion dollars for 2000 (http://aboutus.vzw.com/ataglance.html ). By signing one of these contracts, a person can get stuck with service that they are unhappy with and cannot do anything about it unless they want to pay a large fine for breaking that contract. If a person is not at the end of their contract but wants to upgrade the phone they have, they will have to pay hundreds of dollars to do so, even if that same phone is being offered for free to new customers.
Give it a main idea: communication and relationshipHis third idea states, embedded in every technology; there is a powerful idea, sometimes 2 or 3 ideas. The idea behind the cell phone was to connect people, to make it easier to communicate with each other and to make it more convenient. Is it working? Yes, it is convenient. Yes, it does connect us together, and it is easy. But how are we communicating and is it benefiting us as a whole? The cell phone has changed the way we communicate in person, face to face. What good is a communication tool, if we are distracted by it, that we can’t even talk to the person sitting at the same table? When we are talking to somebody in person we have altered our vocabulary, to a shortened, abbreviated, text message version of English. This has the potential to create some serious problems for kids who are still trying to learn the language as it was meant to be.
Postman’s fourth idea talks about how technological change doesn’t just add to society, it changes it. The cell phone continues to change the world; it has changed how we communicate with others. I have seen people sitting together, texting each other instead of talking. At dinner many children are sitting at the table, texting with their friends, during a time that was once used to bond a family closer together. The dinner table used to be a place were parents could talk to their children and find out how they are doing and what is new in their life. Today kids don’t communicate much with their parents or with other siblings; the dinner table is now a place of silence.
Our idea of who needs a cell phone has also changed. Today, our culture believes everybody needs a cell phone, and we think we have to have it on us at all times. Before the cell phone, when a person would get ready to leave their house, there were two things they needed to have. They were car keys and a wallet or purse. Now we have added the cell phone to that list. Most people cannot do anything or go anywhere without it. Our phones hold all of our important information, it has our contacts, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, calendars and daily schedules, our music, and now they also have features like Internet connection. I no longer have to pay for Internet service at my house; I can connect my home desktop to the Internet, using my phones connection, wirelessly. Lots of people would consider themselves lost without their phones. Before cell phones, people would never consider themselves lost without a piece of electronics.
Finally, Postman’s fifth idea brings to our attention to how media and technology tends to become mythic; this is becoming more obvious when we think about the cell phone. I have heard some people joke around about how cell phones are so popular that in the near future we will start issuing phone numbers to babies the day they are born. This might not be so ridiculous, after all. I have read some reports about how; soon we might be issued a phone number, like a social security number. When you change phone carriers, your phone number will transfer with you, and with that, all your personal info will transfer also. This will definitely elevate the cell phone to that mythic status.