Filed under: My book in the making...
In about 1990, the mobile telephone was developed and the lucky people with well-paying jobs started to buy the idea of a wireless connection between themselves and any other phone in the county. A device known as the pager, which preceded the mobile phone by several years, was worn on the owner’s belt and allowed them to receive a numeric message, prompting them to call the number displayed on their pager sceen. The pager didn’t last for long, as eventually mobile phone technology had flooded into the general public by about 2002.
What started as a novelty item for the father or mother of a family quickly became a necessity for any prepubescent member of the housefold. By roughly 2005, children as yound as three years old were toting this hand held “cell” phone, able to call their mothers when it was time to pick them up from a friend’s house. It didn’t take much effort from the three year old, as “Mom”, “Dad”, and “Emergency” buttons were all integral developments in cell phones for children.
The computer was developed as a device for top-tier companies to store large masses of information in a digital format, cutting down on basements upon basements of filing cabinets chock full of voluminous reels of paper. This computer technology also inevitably made its way to the general public and by the dawn of the twenty-first century, every middle-class American family was connected to one another through a digital reality existing solely in the metals and plastics fused together to form each computer.
Just like the cellular phone, a family computer proved to fall short of the demands for individualized technology. A family computer could only be split into so many different password-protected user interfaces before each person felt entitled to a computer of their own. Within the first several years of the twenty-first century, no teen was going away to secondary school without a “laptop.” As the name might insinuate, computers were crunched down from bulky monitors and burdensome modems into personal flip-top hubs for digital correspondence and portals into an alternate existance never realized without a computer.
Of course, the digital wave did not subside at sea. This wave grew and grew until it reached shore and swallowed all those on the fringe of the beach. It eventually consumed even those who had not , on their own accord, jumped into the vast ocean of digital technology where everthing is connected by the liquid mass in between each object, where an electric or digital current can be dispatched from any point and received instantaneously by anyone submerged in the sea of connectivity. The waves inflated and expaned until the shoreline dissolved and the water encroached upon the land and spread to comsume all its occupants.
Those humans dry to the digital drip were eventually scooped up by the sea for the most part. By 2020, less than two percent of the human population was without a personal computing device. This meager percentage consisted of vagrants and incarcerated criminals.
However, most of these outliers were eliminated and forgotten about. Actually, the order was reversed. Once forgotten about; once no longer connected to those around you and accounted for in at least one person’s database of acquaintances and correspondents, a human fall off the map, thus eliminated from reality.
Everyone else was connected. Everyone else was connected by a less-than-physical connection that proved the difference between reality and the mere mortal. If someone wasn’t connected to the humans they knew they soon became forgotten about and slipped through the digital web that wove society together. If not connected to this all-important, fabricated existence, one soon did not exist. If you couldn’t dial into those around you on a digital plane, you were soon labeled both inept and incompatible with the general public. Those still hanging on to an existence that revolves simply in real-time, a one-tier existence where all human connections exist solely in face-to-face interactions with real voices and real emotions soon were cast as outsiders, as humans completely out of touch with the new reality of the day.
What began as an alternate reality was now the only reality.
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