The Hand-Held Computer and Your Life

The ever-growing field of technology is, once again, making the average person's life a little more convenient. In the article "Will smartphones soon replace wallets?", it explains that technology companies are developing a new system, so we treat smartphones like a credit card. A new technology system called "near field communication," or NFC is essentially a short-range radio transmission that allows smartphone users to make secure digital payments with their smartphones. I think that these large strides in technology are wonderful, and it means that I won't have to keep track of as many objects now. However, as I learn that more and more things are replaced by apps on a smartphone, I think about how a small computer is becoming the center of many people's lives. One day I was traveling home on the bus, and I looked around at all the passengers. Almost all of them were either staring at their smartphone screens or had earphones, attached to their smartphones, plugged into their ears. It made me think of the humans in the Pixar film WALL-E. They stopped associating with each other. Their computer or television screens became the center of their lives. Like I said before, technology development is wonderful, but this new payment option for smartphones shows that technology is slowly moving into a new area of our lives. How long will it be before there is an app for every little thing in our lives? Please see the link below for the article, "Will smartphones soon replace wallets?" by Mike Wehner.

<http://news.yahoo.com/will-smartphones-soon-replace-wallets---213831840.html>

Technical Progression and Us

I read a talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks titled "Focus and Priorities." One can find the talk in the LDS May 2001 Ensign. There was a part of the talk that stood out to me. He told the story of two men who were in a business partnership selling melons. They would purchase a truck load of melons for one dollar a melon and then sell those melons for one dollar a melon. Obviously they are not making any profit this way. They soon noticed this. The story ends with one of the men proposing that they buy a bigger truck. I immediately thought of how the world has progressed in technology. However, no matter how much the world progresses in technology, if one is using it to idle away time, there is not much of progression for that one. There can be times that technology can be used for entertainment purposes. If the use ends there, what was the point of progression? It ends up being a time-waster. One must be careful of how progression is used.