Sunday, October 14, 2007

I remember when I was little I had a toy cell phone. It was one of those now ancient looking machines that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie rather than something a person in normal society would use. Then my parents got their cell phones. These were not the gigantic phones like the toy, but they were still much bigger than what you want as a cell phone today. As the years progressed, they traded their phones in for the newer and better versions. When my older sister began driving my brother and me to school, she received her very own cell phone, and in the following years my brother received his and I received my very own cell phone. Like my own family, everyone around us seemed to have cell phones. Parents buy the newest and smallest cell phones for their thirteen year olds, and other men and women save up for the newest cell phone such as the new iPhone.
With everyone using cell phones, the normal land line phones are fading into antiquity it seems. Some families have given up entirely on their landlines in favor of just solely using cell phones as their means of communication to the outside world. It seems odd at first to think of giving up the normal phone system for the other, but it does make sense. The cell phone is quite practical and useful. You can have it anywhere. You can contact anyone at anytime of day. There’s no more need for searching for change to pay the charge to use a pay phone. These things that seemed to be almost timeless seem to be quickly fading into history. It seemed that something as simple as a normal telephone would be always here, a constant such as books and television. However, with the creation of new technologies these constants seem to be on shaky ground, and will probably soon just be example of past innovations that only belong in a museum.