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Daily Prompt: Second Time Around — Earth Abides, George R. Stewart

Cover of "Earth Abides"

I first read Earth Abides by George R. Stewart more than 30 years ago. It wasn’t newly published even then, but it was new to me.

Unlike many other books I have read and forgotten, Earth Abides has stayed in my mind. I have returned to it again and again. I can recall it with remarkable clarity especially considering  the hundreds of books I read every year, probably thousands since I first encountered Earth Abides.

Earth Abides is considered by many writers and readers of science fiction as a “foundation book” and is often cited as “the original disaster” story. A foundation book it is, but “original disaster story” entirely misses the point.

Earth Abides isn’t a disaster story, original or otherwise. It is a book of rebuilding, renewal and hope. The event that initiates the story is a disaster, a plague accidentally released from a laboratory that runs amok and kills off most of Earth’s human population. Some small percentage of earth’s population is naturally immune to the bug (as is true for all plagues) plus anyone who survived a rattlesnake bite has immunity.

The plague is the back story. The front story and theme of Earth Abides is the ways that humankind copes with the tragedy as scattered remnants of people gradually find each other. Individuals find others to form groups. Through marriage and the pressures of survival, groups become tribes. Most ailments of the old earth were eliminated by the plague. The vanished ailments are physical — the new generations are wonderfully healthy — and sociological. Archaic religious and social structures are shed by survivors who don’t remember what purpose they served or have any interest in preserving them. The new world has no room for bigotry, hatred or mental disease. It’s a small world, a new world with much to do. The strong and useful will survive, but the unfit cannot be allowed to reproduce. The world is too small to support those who cannot contribute.

Thus new civilizations thrive and increase. Ultimately, they repopulate the earth. The reborn world contains bits and pieces of what went before, but is redesigned in a new and presumably healthier way. The world is free of race hatred and religious prejudice, as well as most diseases.

The book was re-released in a 60th anniversary edition a few years ago, including an audio version with an introduction by Connie Willis.

Cover of the 1949 Random House hardcover editi...

Cover of the 1949 Random House hardcover edition of Earth Abides. Cover illustration by H. Lawrence Hoffman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have owned dozens of copies of this book. I usually keep an extra copy to give it to people who haven’t read it.

The complaint that the book is a bit preachy is fair enough, but so are many science fiction and fantasy books, including everything Robert Heinlein wrote and everything written by Anne Rice. Anne Rice is so preachy that some of her books are the straight stuff: no plot, no story, just preaching. George R. Stewart had, in my opinion, better points to make and gets a free preaching pass from me. Most writers, especially in science fiction, have points to make and it won’t kill anyone to ponder them.

It’s also important to remember that the book was published in another time and place. Many things that are largely accepted without a second thought today were revolutionary 64 years ago. In some parts of the world and in this country too, they are still revolutionary. We have moved on … to a point.

When the book was first published interracial relationships and rejection of formal religion were not accepted or tolerated most places. Attitudes have changed though there’s still more than enough racism, religious fanaticism and hatred to go around.

I’ve seen criticisms pointing out how out of date the book’s technology is. It wouldn’t matter if the technology of the world gone missing had been spot on accurate. Gone is gone.

Regardless of how advanced it used to be, whatever it was became insupportable on a depopulated earth. You can’t drive cars without gasoline and you can’t keep the pumps working without electricity. You can’t use telephones or computers when there’s no service. Satellites would circle the earth, but their signals would be received by no living person, so how would it matter? No batteries and no power, and it’s all over when the power is gone. As the book makes clear, the amount of time before the automated system stop functioning when there’s no one to take care of them is a few years — maybe — for even the most basic infrastructure.

After that, the world goes back to a pre-technological world, though not a pre-industrial one. Industry existed before electricity. There has always been wind, water and sun. And books remain, knowledge exists waiting to be re-deployed. Earth abides.

The world ends, the world begins. Earth Abides. Ish and Emma are the “mother” and “father” of the new tribe. Ish, in Hebrew, means “man” and “Eema” means “mother” which I am sure is not coincidental. It’s a wonderful story that suggests the human race has the capacity to not only survive, but reinvent civilization and make a better world. If you haven’t read this book, read it. It’s available in print and on Audible with a fine narrator. I cannot recommend it too highly. Earth Abides is timeless. As is the Earth itself. I discovered today there is an entire site dedicated to George R. Stewart – The EARTH ABIDES Project . The site contains pictures and other memorabilia. Definitely check it out!

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Daily Prompt: The Glacier Quarter – 2011

The Prompt: Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?

The question was intriguing. I took up the challenge. I don’t usually bother with daily prompts (this is the first time). I publish too much stuff already and more seems a bit of overkill. Still, this one caught my attention and I wondered what my search would unearth.

My desk yielded nothing useful. The first purse was equally coin-free.  Finally, at the bottom of my bag, a quarter emerged.

It took 10 minutes to read the date on it. It turns out my eyes no long feel inclined to interpret tiny numbers.  The coin — a shiny quarter — celebrates a glacier. It says glacier on it, so I know that much. Which glacier? I felt lucky to decipher the date. Anything more would be pressing my luck. My strained eyes draw a line in the sand at extracting any more information. I wondered where my magnifying glass had gone. It used to be on top of the  desk … maybe it’s buried under several pounds of paper. Time may bring it to the surface. Or not.

Mumford Dam in Uxbridge

Autumn at the Mumford Dam, October 2011

A digression: I grew up in Queens, New York. One of the two or three major east-west arteries in the borough is Hillside Avenue. Even when I was growing up, it was a very busy road, full of cars, trucks and buses. I crossed twice every day, on my way to school and back again. I was hit by a small truck the corner of Hillside and 191st Street when I was 15. We didn’t have cell phones, so I had to beg the grumpy shopkeeper to let me call home so I wouldn’t have to limp up the long hill. I was obviously not going to die, but I was banged up. The driver had stayed around long enough to see me get up off the ground. I wasn’t dead, so he took off. Basic hit and run.

When my father got there, he wanted to know if I’d gotten the license plate number. I said no, I was lying on the ground, not a good angle. Dad was seriously pissed off that I didn’t get the number because, he said, I could have gone to college on the proceeds of a lawsuit. He never asked me how I felt or if I wanted to see a doctor. My mother — who never went to doctor for any reason at all — deduced that I hadn’t broken anything. Good enough, I guess. I limped off to take a bath, vaguely feeling there was something wrong with this picture.

That was in 1962. I was still in High School.

Glacier factoid: Hillside Avenue is where the foreward movement of the glacier that covered the region during the last ice age stopped. Was it a red light?  Hillside Avenue, with its shops, bus stops and endless traffic was also, it would seem, a significant geological and archeological marker. Whenever something is being built along the road, the archeologists and other scientific hunters get to explore it first. They’ve found all kinds of artifact, bones of extinct ice age animals, other stuff. I haven’t heard about any mammoths, but I might have missed it. Just a quarter-mile from home. Weird.

2011: I wasn’t doing much. I’d had cancer the previous year. 2011 was a recovery year. I had a slough of despond from which to emerge and a lot of physical issues to deal with. I also had to come to grips with a significantly changed body. I took a lot of photographs that year and read a lot of books. That pretty much sums up that year. I only remember the pictures because it was a colorful autumn and I have pictures, some of my best foliage shots.

Summing up 2011: If I were going to give the year a title, I’d call it the year I didn’t die. That’ll do.

____

Glacial Moraine in Jamaica, Queens

Long Island and Staten Island are products of the last Ice Age when a continental glacier moved south bringing massive amounts of debris from New England. When the ice melted — at Hillside Avenue — the debris was left in huge piles. The hilly southern edge of the pile we call the terminal glacial moraine. Further south (below Hillside Avenue) the land becomes completely flat derived from smaller particles washed of the moraine. The plain was frequently flooded. Between these features, at the foot of the glacier, land is mostly flat but water is still channeled.

Streets like Hillside Avenue and Jamaica Avenue in Queens, and Hyland Blvd. in Staten Island became natural transportation corridors because the lay of the land made it natural.

My elementary school was on Jamaica Avenue. Mammoth bones anyone?


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Earth Abides — George R. Stewart

Earth AbidesEarth Abides by George R. Stewart

I originally read this book more than 30 years ago. It wasn’t a new book even then, but it was new for me. Unlike so many other books I read and forgot, it stuck in my mind and I remember it with a clarity that is remarkable considering how many thousands of books I have read since. Earth Abides stays bright and shiny in my mind.

I have heard the book referred to as “the original disaster” story, but that misses the point. It isn’t a disaster story, original or otherwise. It is, as the title suggests, a book of renewal and hope. Although events are set in motion by a disaster, a plague that kills off most of Earth’s human population, that is only the trigger. Some few people are naturally immune and anyone who was ever bitten by a poisonous snake and survived also is immune.

These remnants of humanity eventually find each one another. They form groups that grow into tribes. They grow and thrive. Ultimately, they repopulate the earth, creating a new society that contains bits and pieces of what went before, but redesigned in a new and hopefully better way.

The book was re-released in a 60th anniversary edition a few years ago, including an audio version with an introduction by Connie Willis.

Cover of the 1949 Random House hardcover editi...

Cover of the 1949 Random House hardcover edition of Earth Abides. Cover illustration by H. Lawrence Hoffman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I cannot count the number of copies of this book I have owned. I love it so much I buy copies of it, give it to people I think will love the story. The books are given theoretically on loan, but never has one of them been returned, so I buy another copy. I should get a volume discount.

The book is a bit preachy, but no  more so than many other popular books. It doesn’t bother me. George Stewart is a lot less preachy than Anne Rice  and he has better points to make and moreover, I agree with him.

Things we accept without a second thought today were revolutionary 63 years ago. When the book was first published both interracial relationships and rejection of formal religion were generally not accepted when the book was published. Attitudes have changed — more some places than others — there’s still more than enough racism, religious fanaticism and hatred to go around.

I’ve seen comments about how out of date the technology is. In fact, it doesn’t matter, not one little bit.

Our current technology has moved on considerably but regardless of  how advanced it’s gotten, any technology is insupportable on a depopulated earth. It makes no difference what had or had not been invented. It would be useless in any case. You can’t drive cars without gasoline and you can’t keep the pumps working without electricity. You can’t use telephones when there is no service. Our satellites might continue to circle the earth, but without signals, how would it matter? No batteries, no power? It’s all over when the power is gone and that, as the book shows, is at best a few years for even the most basic infrastructure. After that, we are back to a pre-technical world. Not a pre-industrial world. Industry existed before electricity: wind, water, sun … and the Earth itself continue.

The world ends, the world begins. Earth Abides.

Ish and Emma are the “mother” and “father” of the new tribe. Ish, in Hebrew, means “man” and “Eema” means “mother” which I am sure is not coincidental. It’s a wonderful story that suggests the human race has the capacity to not only survive, but reinvent civilization and created a better society. If you haven’t read this book, read it. It’s available in print and on Audible with a fine narrator. I cannot recommend it too highly.

Earth Abides is timeless. As is the Earth itself.

I discovered today there is an entire site dedicated to George R. Stewart – The EARTH ABIDES Project — by a man who knew him and has written his biography. The site contains pictures and other memorabilia. If you are a fan, this is a gift for us all.

This comment could not be transferred, so I have included it as part of the re-run of my original review.

Nice post about Earth Abides, and you found one of the easter eggs in Stewart’s book. But the photo (Note: I deleted the photo to which he is referring – MA)  is NOT of George R. Stewart. If you visit my blog —http://georgerstewart.wordpress.com — and follow the menu link at the top to the George R. Stewart web pages, you’ll see a photo of GRS. (I knew him, and have recently had a bio of GRS published.) You’re certainly right about Earth Abides — and you’re not the only one who feels that way. NASA’s Dr. Jim Burke, composer Philip Aaberg, Jimi Hendrix, Stephen King, Kim Stanley Robinson, Walt Disney — all were inspired by Stewart’s work or directly by EA. So thanks for the post. Cheers, DMS.


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Dumb and getting dumber

Our books say a lot about us ... maybe too much.

Our books say a lot about us … maybe too much.

I’m a big believer in research, checking and double-checking sources. But I also learned a couple of important lessons writing documentation and other educational and explanatory material for almost 40 years.

Relax, Chicken Little. The sky is not falling.

The first rule of survival is to keep a sense of proportion. Whether it’s your personal life or national news, not everything is equally important. Lighten up. Develop a healthy attitude of skepticism. If you keep believing everything you read, I have to assume that you aren’t very bright.

Assume your friends are kidding, not trying to insult you. If they really are insulting you, maybe you need different friends; then again, maybe you deserve it. The problem may not be them: it could be you. Just consider the possibility.

It’s been a rough period for everyone. We need to laugh, not get enraged at everything we read, at everything anyone says.

As far as “news” goes, most stuff in the news isn’t news. It hasn’t happened. It will never happen. Not only has it not yet happened, but is isn’t even at the proposal stage. It’s the stuff people run up the flagpole to see who salutes. Somewhere between 99 – 100% of it won’t make it to proposal, much less law. If you let everything get to you, you will spend your life outraged. That’s hard on your nervous system, blood pressure and those around you. Not everything is life and death. Chill.

More rules for surviving the information age

Stop blaming technology. Technology doesn’t do anything. It’s what you do with it that counts.

Rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, I never said technology is “bad.” God forbid I should be so hypocritical.

I love my electronic goodies. My point continues to be that people — especially young people — confuse the tool and the purpose. They become so pixellated by the glamour and total coolness of widgets and gadgets that they forget  these are not an end, but a means. You are supposed to use this stuff to accomplish things: communicate, create, learn. Write a book. Edit a photo. Make a movie. Design something. Think amazing thoughts.

On the communications, front, if you use nothing but electronic communication for your relationships, you aren’t going to know how to talk to people.Eventually you will have to talk to someone about something important. The sooner you get the hang of it, the better. I watch my granddaughter and her friends sit next to one another while texting. How can you learn to relate if you don’t know how to have a conversation?

Worse, if you use computers to think for you, you won’t learn think. The substitution of automatically gathered data for focused research and thoughtful analysis is particularly alarming because (wait for it, drumroll, flourish of trumpets … okay, now) computers can’t think.

That’s right. You heard me. Computers can’t think. They are processors that collect and find data. They follow rules embedded in the software that runs them. Which, I should point out, you probably didn’t write (if you did, excuse me, you are exempt). After that, we the humans, Earthly creatures who sit at the top of the food chain, are free to use that data to whatever purpose we choose. But what do we choose? Good question. Mostly, far as I can tell, nothing much.

The big problem is that with the help of a computer or any one of a zillion computer-like devices (telephones, tablets, pods, pads, doohickies and wazoos), anyone and his cousin George can collect information by the bushel.  Having collected oodles of data, most people figure they’ve done their part but their part hasn’t even begun. Most people cannot figure out what concepts or ideas the collected information supports, what conclusions can be drawn from it, how to analyze what — if anything — it means. Nor can they connect two related ideas without a flow chart …  and many can’t connect two related ideas even with the flow chart.

In a world where we actually need to warn people not to text while driving, something is seriously wrong with the whole thinking thing.

The widespread outbreak of stupid is alarming. All over America, mothers are wondering how they produced such stupid children.

We don’t think. We don’t read. We skim over information, ideas, articles, gathering buzzwords and slogans, never stopping to figure out if this means anything. Worse yet, half the stuff we learn by this process is wrong

– Α – 

It’s not what you don’t know that will get you; it’s what you DO know that’s wrong.

Information is not knowledge.

Information is not communication.

– ω –

It takes human brains and thought to change information from raw data to concepts and ideas. You need to synthesize, postulate, consider. Determine what is important and what isn’t, what is relevant, and most of all: what is true.

We don’t seem, as a society, to believe that thinking is required anymore. Google it. There’s your answer. But whether or not you can get the answer by looking it up depends on the question. If the question is “Who got the best actor Oscar in 1974,” you can look it up. If the question involves right or wrong, good or evil, the existence of a deity, the value of anything … the meaning of anything … looking it up is part 1 or an infinitely long list.

Then, there’s telling other people about what you’ve figured out. Just because you collected a vast amount of information doesn’t mean that it will mean anything to anyone else. Does it mean anything to you? Seriously? If it’s just a bunch of facts that anyone could collect, does it matter? You need to do something with the information to make it mean something. After that,  you can disseminate it in a form that others can understand. If you don’t take this final step, it’s just noise. Or spam.

I think here, therefore I am here. I think.

I think here, therefore I am here. I think.

How dumb are we?

The dumbing down of society is not because of our tools and toys. It’s because we’ve forgotten they are just tools and toys.

We have fantastic resources and waste them on drivel. Modern processors are amazing. We have access to any data, any information ever written, yet we have not improved our ability to communicate, relate, think, or create. Without a context, all our fancy stuff is expensive, silly playthings on which we waste time and other precious resources.

We have tools. If only we were using them better, our world — our own personal world as well as the great big world we share — would be a better place.

P.S. Those weird characters before and after the big quotes are an alpha and an omega. If this doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry. You can look it up.


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About those dinosaurs … It all started with “Fantasia”

This conversation started because my husband, unlike me, is not fascinated by dinosaurs. He seemed a bit baffled as to why I’d include a big story about dinosaurs when I didn’t write it or take any of the photographs. Note: Should a dinosaur wander through my back yard, be assured that I will be out there taking pictures until either the huge reptile ambles away or eats me, whichever comes first.

Unlike many things which have adult origins — technology, philosophy, history — all the “ologies” and “osophies” that attended my education and subsequent research — my passion for dinosaurs goes all the way back, back, back in time to when I was four or five years old and my Aunt Ethel took me to see “Fantasia,” the original, not the later remake.

Who remembers in “Fantasia” the history of the earth, starring the rise and fall of the dinosaurs? It is set to Igor Stravinsky‘s brilliant “The Rites of Spring.” The music itself might be enough, but with the Disney artists on their best game, it was something else and embedded itself in my mind for a lifetime.

In case you’ve forgotten or have by some oversight never seen it, here it is. I wish it were a little brighter but the sound is excellent and it is still as extraordinary as ever it was:

None of these graphics were generated by computers. All of it … each frame … was drawn by human artists. The music was played live by an orchestra full of real musicians. Contrary to popular opinion, special effects were not invented by Steven Spielberg.

I was just a little kid and it scared the bejeezus out of me. I had nightmares for years about dinosaurs hiding under the bed, in the hallway, in my closet. I couldn’t sleep without a nightlight because I was sure there was a dinosaur lurking, ready to grab me in giant jaws with teeth 9 feet long. I was a child of great imagination and excessive sensitivity.

As I got older, I began to read books and discovered lots of really cool stuff about dinosaurs, most important (to me) was that North America — what is now the middle of the United States had been giant reptile central, the heartland of the Brontosaurus, Velociraptor and other astonishing creatures. Where now stand cities like St. Louis and Kansas City, Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled. Perhaps their legacy lives on in corporate boardrooms and Washington D.C., but I digress.

When this was made, the whole asteroid thing was yet unknown, so the history of the earth is missing that piece of information, but I’m sure Disney’s artists would have happily included it had they known. Meanwhile, I’m totally whacked at the idea of earth getting hit by an asteroid. I always have a good laugh when someone in some space lab mentions, casually, that there’s an asteroid headed our way, but not to worry, there’s no better than a 50-50 chance it will really hit us.

That we pathetic creatures, crawling around the surface of the earth, believe we are all-powerful and can control our destiny by technology is funny. Not only has this planet been hit by asteroids — not once but many times — but each time, the event precipitated the extinction of Earth’s dominant species. The dinosaurs lasted a lot longer than we have. Should one of those big hunks of space debris smack into us, I think it unlikely that all the computers, weaponry, technology or prayers we can muster will be of any use at all. Our collective ass will be grass without even the opportunity to text our best buddies about the impending big bang.

We will be gone, quite likely having had even less effect on our planet, in the final analysis, than did the dinosaurs.

Humankind has always suffered above all from the sin of pride. Hubris, as the Greeks called it. We think we are creatures of God and perhaps we are, but who said we are the only creatures of God or that He gave us a permanent free pass from extermination?

map-dinosaurs-1993

And this is what so fascinates me and probably always will. That these creatures, these huge, powerful creatures who ruled this planet for more years than we can comprehend were, in a single calamitous event, exterminated. Eliminated from the earth leaving just their bones by which to remember them. And we think we are so all-powerful. I bet they thought so, too.

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Death of the Dinosaurs: The Asteroid Didn’t Act Alone

See on Scoop.it – Traveling Through Time

dino_decline_0502

There’s never a good time to get clobbered by an asteroid — something the dinosaurs discovered in the worst way possible. It was 65.5 million years ago when an asteroid measuring 6 miles (10 km) across slammed into the earth just off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, blasting out a 110-mile (180 km) crater and sending out a cloud of globe-girdling debris that cooled and darkened the world. That spelled doom for species that had come to like things bright and warm. Before long (in geological terms, at least) the dinos were gone and the mammals arose.

That’s how the story has long been told, and it’s still the most widely accepted theory. Now, however, a study led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and published in Nature Communications suggests that the asteroid might not have affected all dinosaur species equally. Some, including the well-loved triceratops and duck-billed dinosaurs, might have been on their way out already and were simply hastened to the exit by the asteroid blast. The reason for their weakened state — and the way the investigators discovered it — provides both new insights into the fate of the dinosaurs and new methods with which to study their world.

The asteroid impact — known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction — was always thought to have been an equal-opportunity annihilator, and there was good evidence to support that. Tracking the rise and fall of the dinosaurs was always done simply by counting how many species were around at any given moment in history. The more species there were, the better the overall clade was doing; the fewer there were — particularly after the K-T — the closer to extinction all dinosaurs came. But that method was never entirely reliable, mostly because paleontologists do their digging in so many different places.

“Results can be biased by uneven sampling of the fossil record,” says Steve Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University and one of the participants in the new study. “In places where more rock and fossils were formed, like in America’s Great Plains, you’ll find more species.” Similarly, in places that didn’t fossilize remains easily, you’d find far fewer — even if at one time there were just as many animals there.

Hadrosaurs by a lake.

Hadrosaurs by a lake. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Natural History team, led by paleontologist Mark Norell, thus decided to take a different approach — looking at the biodiversity within different groups of dinosaurs. If one group — the carnivores, say — was thriving, it ought to be producing more species than groups that were struggling just to hang on. When the investigators looked at things this way — sampling 150 species across seven major groups — they were able to paint a much different and much-less-uniform picture of how all the dinosaurs were faring before the asteroid arrived.

In general, the number of species in the small herbivore group (the ankylosaurs and pachycephalosaurs) was stable or even increasing. The same was true for the carnivores (the tyrannosaurs and coelurosaurs) as well as for the largest herbivores (the sauropods). Things were not so good for the slightly smaller herbivores known as bulk feeders because of the wide range of vegetation they ate (the hadrosaurs and ceratopsids). They appear to have been in decline for a good 12 million years before the K-T wipeout, with their species head count dwindling steadily over that time.

“People often think of the dinosaurs being monolithic,” says Richard Butler of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, who also participated in the study. “We say, ‘The dinosaurs did this, the dinosaurs did that.’ But dinosaurs were hugely diverse. Different groups were probably evolving in different ways and the results of our study show that very clearly.”

So why were the hadrosaurs and ceratopsids having such a hard time? Geography may explain at least some of the problems. The bulk feeders were especially common in North America, a continent that was then bisected by the Western Interior Seaway, a wide and deep body of water that ran from what is now the Arctic Ocean to what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Changes in the depth, width and temperature of the sea might have reduced the food supply or altered the surrounding ecosystem in other ways that made it hard for the hadrosaurs and ceratopsids to survive. The tectonic collisions, which gave rise to what are now the Rockies and the other mountains of the west, might have had a similar effect.

Tyrannosaurus rex, a theropod from the Late Cr...

Tyrannosaurus rex, a theropod from the Late Cretaceous of North America, pencil drawing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Whatever the cause of the two groups’ decline, it’s not certain that their condition was terminal — that they would not have somehow stabilized themselves if the asteroid hadn’t come along and rendered the whole question academic. Indeed, throughout the whole of the Mesozoic Era — from 250 million to 65 million years ago — diversity within dinosaur species was known to fluctuate quite a bit. “Small increases or decreases between two or three time intervals may not be noteworthy within the context of the … history of the [groups],” says Norell.

Of course, the asteroid did come along and did render everything academic. But if all of the dinosaurs left history’s stage at more or less the same time and for more or less the same reason, they now appear to have strutted their hour in ways that were more varied — and in some cases more fraught — than we ever appreciated before.

See on www.time.com

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Mobile Phones: Remember when we used them to make phone calls …

Kindle Fire HD 7 inch

You could call me old-fashioned, but I’m not. I’m also not stupid, out of touch, nor a technophobe. I love technology. If I had more money, I’d have even more computers than I do and arguably, I already have too many.

It’s just that I think we’ve lost track of why we have telephones.

I have 3 personal computers: a desktop with a big HD monitor, a 15″ laptop more powerful than my desktop, and a notebook mini that I use in the bedroom and lives on my night table. I also have 2 Kindles, including the new Fire which is a media center, though some consider it a computer (I don’t). For mobile communications, I have a Blackberry Torch .

Blackberry Torch

It’s very good at 3 things — all of which scream “communications” to me: Email, telephone calls, and maintaining a shared calendar with my husband so we don’t double schedule stuff. It would text just fine, but as it happens, I hate texting. My 10-inch notebook has as small a keyboard as I’m willing to use for typing anything beyond a couple of words. I type with 10 fingers. My thumb, opposable and all, is excellent for picking things up and holding a pen, even for playing the piano. They are not designed for typing. That must be a genetic adaptation that occurred in the last 30 years. My thumbs are not pointy or fast-moving. They are thumbs that perform thumb-appropriate tasks.

In a never-ending attempt to make a single device that can do everything, mobile phones now do just about everything except make quality phone calls. Most of them have terrible audio quality on the phone. They may have decent reproduction for music and games, but you can’t hear a voice on the other end of a call. Crackle, white noise and low amplitude makes real phone calls torture. My husband and I each bought a Blackberry because we wanted to be able to make phone calls and hear each other and sometime, other people, on the telephone. Shocking concept? Are you appalled that we use our phones primarily as portable communications devices?

iPhone 5

While we were in the phone store, we tried out all the different phones including the iPhone and the only one that had good quality voice reproduction on telephone calls was Blackberry. The others are all trying to be a cross between an MP player, mini computer, and game boy. The voice quality on phone calls was awful, but apparently no one actually uses that function anymore.

I have computers to compute. I have an MP player and I have the Kindle Fire for media. I use my telephone for communication. Oh, and I carry a small, good quality camera for taking pictures on the fly.

I strongly believe and no one has ever shown me any good reason to change my mind that anything that is trying to do everything isn’t doing anything really well … or it’s doing one thing well and twenty other things badly.

My son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter have telephones that are now close to half the size of my Kindle. Soon, they will be as big or bigger. Does anyone remember how we all wanted smaller phones so we didn’t have to carry a great big “thing” with us?

For a while, they got a little too small for my taste, but then they got back to a size that is definitely telephony.

Dell XPS 15

Now, with each added function they put on the phone, the more apps, widgets, peripherals, gadgets, functions, styli, wires, earphones, docks and doodads you need to do accomplish these different things on what originated as a telephone, the less I want to do with them. It’s not that I don’t understand them. I understand just fine

I don’t LIKE them.

Honk if you think a phone should be first and foremost, a device that is very good for making and receiving telephone calls!

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