21st Century Technology
Al-Ittihad, UAE, March 15
At the end of February, my BlackBerry Curve was no longer usable, because the device only works on the 3G network, and the phone service provider ended that service. So, I can turn on the device and still type a message, but since I can’t connect to the network, I can’t send what I’m writing to any other device. My friends and family have warned me for years that this day would come, but I ignored them because I simply couldn’t imagine life without this device. Without exaggeration, the device has become a part of my life. For the past thirteen years, I’ve spent the greater part of every day using it. I wrote drafts of my last two books on my BlackBerry. And most afternoons, you would find me bent over the small phone and browsing my weekly column or reading a report. Last month marked 30 years since I started writing my weekly columns. I had never learned to type, nor did I feel comfortable using a computer keyboard, so for the first 17 years of my career I wrote my articles by hand and paid my assistant to decipher my notes and digitize them. Because I write a lot, I’ve come up with techniques to make my writing easier, such as making sure that the surface under the paper is not too smooth or that the lead of the pencil isn’t too hard or too brittle. Then one Friday, I found myself at the Chicago airport, my return flights home canceled due to inclement weather, and I hadn’t finished my column yet. The airport did not have a fax machine, so there was no way to send a handwritten text to my office. So, I transferred my hard-to-read handwriting to my BlackBerry and emailed it to my office. My assistant replied sarcastically: “Welcome to the 21st century!” From that moment onward, I fell into the captivity of the device. Over the years, my work performance on my little device improved dramatically. Eventually, I was able to type a text of 800 words in about an hour on my BlackBerry. I became so attached to my BlackBerry that when the company announced that it would not be manufacturing additional devices, my office ordered 4 spares. When the cellphone company announced that it would phase out 3G devices and that BlackBerry devices would no longer work, I didn’t want to believe it and ignored the warnings. Then that inevitable day in February came. But life goes on. I wrote this article on an iPhone. This article is the second I have written on this device. Following over a decade of working on my BlackBerry, my fingers naturally gravitate toward where the old buttons once were. I miss that feeling of touching the BlackBerry buttons and moving the cursor. But the time has come for me to put up with the technological advances of our time and part ways with the old device. That’s just the nature of how technology works. – James Zogby (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)
