I have recently joined the majority of the free world in having a smartphone. This has been a long journey for me, as I did not really want to get one and have gone to absurd lengths over the past few years to avoid the level of connectivity a smartphone brings. But time and tide wait for no woman and finally I couldn't withstand the movement anymore. I caved.
It has been an eye opening few days. Finally I understand the compulsion so many people have to be staring at their devices from the time they step out of bed until the moment they close their eyes to sleep at night.
Deep down, I've always felt such people were either essentially stupid and easily distracted or fundamentally lacking in social skills. Why would you spend time staring at a screen when there were perfectly good humans, live and in colour, right in front of you in real time?
Alas, within a day of having bought and switched on my first proper smartphone, I found out to my peril that these people are neither dotish nor rude. People just like to be connected.
I swiftly realised how affecting are the whistles, pops and dings of smartphones chiming new messages. You just can't ignore them. Even a committed, hardcore people-avoider like myself finds it hard to not react when the phone makes that annoying little noise.
"A message! Someone loves me!" my reptile brain responds.
My 22-year-old daughter, Miss Thing, is a smartphone veteran. She's had one for years and does in fact seem to live on the thing.
It is without question her primary device, and she uses it for all the mundane things I use my own laptop for–writing, checking mail and reading articles online, for example. As a second-generation netizen she has a level of comfort on the Internet I'll probably never have, even though I've been online for 20 years now. She's a Net native; I merely moved here from Analogue Country.
It shouldn't surprise me, therefore, that her communication on the Internet is so seamlessly part of her life. There is, for example, the concept of "ambient Skyping." This is where you use the Skype platform, which allows voice and video calls over the Internet, as a kind of background application running for hours at a time.
It's like sitting quietly in the same room as another person and being able to occasionally look over and smile, say hi, and go back to whatever you had been doing before–except that the rooms you're in might be in two different countries, thousands of miles apart.
The form of communication that is the most mind-blowing to me, however, is without question Snapchat. This platform is built for recording video micro-messages you can send to anyone else with the app, individually or as a group. Once the message is seen, it vanishes from both the Snapchat servers and the recipients' devices. Permanently.
Miss Thing is not the only person who is enamoured with this gone-before-you-know-it communication.
A Techcrunch.com article last year said the platform had around 200 million users who sent 700 million photos–and other forms of "snaps"–a day.
She said she likes it because it's like real life–fleeting. The very impermanence of it provides a relief from the weight of the Internet's permanence.
I have emails from 2006, being a bit of an email hoarder. My Facebook account is like a poorly searchable archive of the past eight years of my life. Somewhere on FB there's a record that Geoff Ramsammy broke up with me on a New Year's Day how many ever years ago, and that I got married (not to Geoff Ramsammy) in 2013.
My life on the Internet is an open book if you have the right passwords. Snapchat would close some of those chapters, relegating them to the realm of ephemera–leaving the past in the past, where perhaps some of those memories belong.
But I also think there is value in being able to go into an old box and retrieve the letters my schoolmate Shalene Ali wrote me when I was a teenager and she had just migrated to North America.
The sensations of unfolding a 25-year-old letter, smelling the dusty pressed flower in it, slipping it back into a brittle envelope...these are experiences Miss Thing will never have.
I wonder what communication she will look back on in 30 years when all today's smartphones are dead and gone.