One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are...they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
I'm terribly forgetful. I've lost laptops, cell-phones.
All devices should just sip power and be charged like a calculator is, with a small solar cell. No power adaptors. It's easy to put a solar cell into a device, but it's not powerful enough to drive today's cell phones or laptops. They need too much power to run.
As the OLPC laptop was getting ready to go into mass production in 2007, many executives approached me wanting the screen that I invented, and the laptop architecture that I co-invented, for their new laptops, cell phones, and other devices.
There are more people with cell phones in the world than any other thing on the planet. There are billions of cell phones. There's not not billions of radios.
Now...in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, ipods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.
The one thing I'm absolutely obsessed with lately are gadgets! New cell phones; I walk around with three phones because I have all the new ones, and I can't choose which I prefer.
I think technology is us, not something we invented. I think we are more psychic now because we have cell phones and you can look and see who's calling you. When people start seeing technology as us, as humanity, our whole idea of what existence is, is going to shift.
I'm a relic, and things were a lot different when I was fifteen and sixteen. There were no cell phones, no laptops... I learned to type on an actual typewriter.
The cell phone has transformed public places into giant phone-a-thons in which callers exist within narcissistic cocoons of private conversations. Like faxes, computer modems and other modern gadgets that have clogged out lives with phony urgency, cell phones represent the 20th Century's escalation of imaginary need. We didn't need cell phones until we had them. Clearly, cell phones cause not only a breakdown of courtesy, but the atrophy of basic skills.
As we grow up in more technology-enriched environments filled with laptops and smart phones, technology is not just becoming a part of our daily lives - it's becoming a part of each and every one of us.
All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers - what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. ... We're constructing a single, global machine.
I'm at the doctor's office. I'm in the waiting room. And there's this guy on his cell phone, talking really loud. Does he think he owns the place? Apparently. I think this is so offensive. But you have to remember: It doesn't take a cell phone to make people rude. People were rude before there were cell phones.
Every time there's a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it's used.
The sign at the entrance to my gym locker room says, no cell phones please, cell phones are cameras. They are not. A camera is a Nikon or a Leica or Rolleiflex, and when you strike someone with one, they know they have been hit with something substantial.
I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn't know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, "Why would I carry my phone around?" And now you'll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone.