Sarah Conner, where are you?

Technology, as we all once thought, is there to make our lives better, more productive and allow us to spend more me-time, more time with our creative soul, more time sorting out who we are and where we fit into the whole scheme of things.

Nice goal but we’ve fallen far short of this ideal.

Even with the modernization of the home, washing machines, drying machines, vacuums, microwaves and toasters the modern housewife still spends more time on housework than her equal in the last century.

Today’s office has changed with the emphasis on speed of doing rather than the actuality of the doing itself, starting with telephones and then faxes, followed by faster and faster computers and now the piece de resistance the smartphone. All designed to increase the speed of communication making our jobs easier but in fact does exactly the opposite, it in fact creates a demand to work even faster and has us all moving so fast we don’t even realize the unseen threat.

You cannot go anywhere today without seeing a smartphone-zombie, easily recognized by the smartphone attached to the ear. It has become so addictive that we carry on (or at least try to) conversations with other people while talking on the smartphone, we place orders at shops, restaurants, bakeries while on the smartphone, we drive while on the smartphone, hell I’m sure there are those who even use it during the ultimately intimate human contact, sex.

Practically every near mishap or senseless reduction in speed I’ve encountered on the road is due to someone on a smartphone. Even when walking I encounter the same, I end up dodging other pedestrians who stop suddenly, or change suddenly direction or just wonder into the flow of pedestrian traffic totally oblivious to what's happening around them.

Are our lives any better now that we can be contacted 24/7 no matter if we are at the park, having a hot chocolate or in the bathroom? Where is the time we used to spend just allowing our minds to wander, to investigate, to reason, to speculate or to just dream.

Is technology turning us into mindless zombies where we react impulsively to stimulus only within the limited range of our senses? Where is Sarah Conner when you need her!