At present, The richest man in the world according to Forbes is Carlos Slim Hetu; a Mexican telecoms mogul. Recently, one of Nigeria’s biggest telecommunications firms; MTN declared over 600billion naira profit amidst the economic chaos and losses befalling companies and the economy at large. The above speaks volume of how the emergence of the phone has revolutionised the technological and economic status-quo. The phones unique multi-dimensional applications coupled with personalized ringtones makes the writer posit that the most popular 21st century technological invention is the phone.
Speaking of Phones, The Nation’s Gbenga Omotoso in These Mobile Times, gives a vivid creation of ‘phone-resque’ as he asserts ‘Ring tones are wonderful. From the sonorous tunes to the husky ones. Then the personalised ring tones. This could be the song of a popular musician or the voice of a frontline preacher, saying: "Let somebody shout Halleluyah!"’‘Some of us carry as many as four mobile phones. As we speak on one, the other rings. "Hold on; I’m on another line!" Yet another rings and we complain: "Na wah o; how una take know say I dey here?"’
A popular comedian once hinted, how the phone had turned to God when he described the enormous grip on America’s Individualism due to her use of personalised ringtones. He joked that one day the phone company will buy up the ring tone company and as a strategy cease to give the default ringtones.
Some conservative Nigerian pastors have declared that technology may be inimical to the progress in search of heavenly escapades. In my own opinion, the phone can be said to have further charged up this argument. Inveigle meanings from this; Mr Akande, a Christian mechanic lies to his client that he is purchasing materials for the repairs of that client’s Dewoo when he is actually servicing a richer client’s jeep. Mrs Bamishaye tells her husband that she is in a crucial meeting when she is cuddled up and cuckold in the hands of a younger and more energetic libido. Phone lies are rampant because of the exigencies of the instrument of available lines.
T.S Elliot’s WASTELAND thoroughly reveals the horrible modern life we live in by depicting the mechanistic, unfulfilled life of emotional and relational psychosis. A life of virtual communication performed at the expense of the nuances of facial and gestural cues. An escapist modicum of a life where socialising becomes a problem. There is a sound breeding of complications in an attempt to solve distance in communication.
A naughty post on your facebook page through the ‘cheats’ on the phone says all for the interaction of a young man, no wonder they are failing WAEC,NECO and JAMB. Let’s paint a picture together, a young tech-yippee is asked to write an easy on ‘How I spent my Holiday’, there is a high possibility that it may be written like this.
I spnt my Hols at the Silvrbird Galeria watching films and listenn to music
I got lots of fun and lol.
Though the paragraphs may not be as brutish and short as this, but with this, you would decipher that in the modern existence of general scribble we are faced with students who are wont to misspell, shorten, lose track of context and feel annoyingly exceptional in their self created standards. Phones have also come to play a major role in exam malpractices, boy-girl relationships and the myriad of misinformation posted on the net and searched through google.
ThisDay’s Techno-Mania Takes Control highlights what has become of our lives through this development. When the most intimate relationships are shared through text and your blackberry pre-paid bills takes No.1 on the income scale of preference. When you interact less because of the ‘Young Forever’ song pounding in your ears and the only thing you do for a long time is nod like an agama lizard. Do you buy credit incessantly? Do you pay fewer visits but send text messages to your friends instead, through your multi-dimensional, multi-exceptional phone? If you are pliable to these, you are a free culprit of the post-modernist age.
The great Harvard critic of Literature, Abiodun Jeyifo wrote in The Guardian; Being There For The Call All the Time-Confessions of a Bemused Consumer (1) where he commented on the revolutionary tool of the 21st century called the phone. It has no doubt broken the barriers of communication along the lines of financial stratification as there are expensive and cheap phones. Furthermore, Jeyifo goes confessional when he asserts ‘ I find that I am split, perhaps even schizophrenic subject as far as using the phone is concerned because while I am fairly in control and my individual, existential autonomy is secure and perhaps even consolidated as a maker of calls, as receiver of calls, I am constantly haunted by feelings of a massive invasion and erosion of my privacy, my autonomy, my waking hours, my daily life.’
I totally agree with the superior wisdom of Jeyifo for it is obvious that Phones are taking over our lives. Big business transactions are approved, outsourced and managed through the use of the phone, thereby reducing paperwork. The writer’s poems have now started to assume the first scribble of text messages before final publishing. The alarm clocks, the reminders, the ringtones calling for attention, the bonus offers of sleepless nights by phone service companies and the phone frauds. In fact, when I begin to feel like a phone-prisoner, I switch them off. You will never know how attached you are to your phone unless you lose it, then you realise that the world has left you behind. You have been formatted from the people you know, the professional and inter-personal communications that are the ingredients of your life, DUE TO A MERE PHONE LOSS.
However, phones have come to stay. In Nigeria as well as other countries, the advent of the phone brought about self and corporate employments, skilled and unskilled labour, language developments and destructions, to mention a few. With the exponential improvements and continuous smouldering of naturalness one will totally agree with Ray Kurzweil and David Kelly of the TED fame that inventions are here to either save the world or destroy it depending on how Humans use it.
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