Technological Habituation

I forgot to bring my cell phone with me to work today.

That should be no big deal.  There's a phone here at my desk, although I do have a few clients who are routinely used to using my cell phone. But to my surprise, I fee odd without it.

The reason I feel a bit odd is several fold, but it shows how acclimated we become to technological changes, for good or ill.

When I started practicing law in 1990 I did not have a cell phone. Cell phones weren't even available, I think.  I know that we didn't have them as college students.  The first cell phone we had at all, in my family, was one that my father bought for some reason. It is what they called a "bag phone", which is a relatively large cell phone which you plugged into a vehicle's cigarette lighter (which is what we called a "power point" at that time) for power.  It had no power of its own.  And it was designed for use in a car.

Exactly why my father thought we needed one I don't know.  Maybe it was so that we would have it when we were out in the sticks. We didn't use it much, but we did have it for a period of years.  I know that I still had it when I started dating my wife, which was after my father had died, but only barely.  It seems to me that I also had it when first married.

I'm not really keen on cell phones, even now, and didn't have one for a long time after they became available.  My first one was a cast off from my wife.  Now, however, I have an Iphone and the reason is that it essentially became impossible for a lawyer not to have one.  You need it to check your email while traveling. That sounds like an excuse, but it is not.  I skipped the whole Blackberry thing but there came a day when I was working on a case, while I was on the road, and settlement negotiations broke out while I was traveling.  Having not adopted the smart phone at the time, I found that I was reduced to making piles of calls, where I had cell phone coverage, to see what the heck was going on.  That week I had an Iphone.

I never thought I'd be a person who texts, but I do, and that is what makes not having the Iphone here today odd.  Throughout an average day I'll send a few text.  My wife texts me, and some times my son does, even from school.  I like the fact that this means they're sort of connected to me all the time.

That's something that was totally different before the cell phone.  I was, and remain, used to the idea of being out in the sticks in contact with nobody.  And prior to the cell phone when I was at work, I was out of contact except via the office phone, which I limited pretty much to work calls. At that time I can recall it being a real irritant that some office staff took huge numbers of personal calls in a day. People still do, I'm sure, but  they aren't tying up an office line now by doing it. 

More significantly, when I was away at school, I was really away.  That wasn't so pleasant, but that's something that the current generation will really not experience, again for good or ill.

This is, of course, a species of habituation.  I'm habituated now to having a smart phone.  And a computer.  But it wasn't always so.  And perhaps it isn't a good thing.  Indeed, I have some changes coming up regarding that.

One thing I've been doing for a couple of years, and which I'm electronically habituated to, is updating a couple of historical daily calendars.  One is my Today In Wyoming's History blog and the other is the daily  history thread on the Society of the Military Horse website.  I've done those, for some time, every day before I head to work.  I'm stopping that, however.

Indeed, I've already stopped updating the Wyoming History blog entries, as of about December 1.  I have the old posts set to keep posting daily until December 31, but after that I'm changing the format of the blog to stop daily entries.  I have been updating it for over a year, and I have most of the daily events I can readily catalog entered, so there's no need for it to be repetitious.  I'll keep the blog, and hopefully find a way to make a calendar for it so people researching any one day can do so easily, but after December 31, 2013, the blog will only be occasionally updated with new entries pertaining to Wyoming's history. 

I'm also gong to stop updating the SMH calendar as well.  Maybe somebody else will take over it, but it's run for several years and is very complete.  Most days, I don't add anything new to it, so there's no reason to update it.  Or at least somebody else would add more flavor to it.

This means that my morning routine is starting to change, and I like it.  I may not turn the computer on as much in the  mornings, or at all, as I've grown used to.  My blogging will continue on as for some reason I have a compulsion to write, but the daily entry type of stuff will cease and I may go back to reading in the mornings, like I used to do.  Indeed, I did that this morning and didn't miss the computer really.