Scary new phone

Fifteen years late, I'm finally trying to catch up with the twenty-first century. It's a little embarrassing, in 2024, to admit that I've never owned a smartphone, but the switch-off of the 3G mobile signal has rendered my basic cellphone useless. I've long been accustomed to using it only in certain parts of the house, and sometimes having to go out onto the deck to connect with the poor cellphone signal our end of the valley endures, but for the past couple of weeks I've found I have to walk a lot further into the village to find the 2G connection, which is clearly not practical. P has been planning for this for some time, and ordered a scary shiny new smartphone for each of us well in advance of the switch-off, but it's taken me too long to transfer all the contacts from my old phone into a new database, and I was reluctant to transfer my number before completing the task in case my old SIM card then stopped functioning altogether. My basic calls and texts only phone has no connectivity at all, so I had to work through everything a line at a time and type into my new contacts list every number I wanted to hold onto. I should have done this long ago of course, and when I have time (ha!) I'll go through my three address books to add those details too, though I certainly won't be discarding the orange and purple address book my best friend gave me for my eleventh birthday in 1971 or the beautiful A5 one with the Jane Ray illustrations I loved from J's fairy tale books.

Now, having missed years of smartphone developments, I'm daunted by the size of the learning curve.  I started using home computers in the 1980s, guided by P, who had studied computing in the late 70s when the university mainframe filled a sizeable room, and had been an early adopter of what were then called microcomputers. In the 80s and 90s he ran a small business offering computer services such as word and data processing, and later moved into desktop publishing, creating camera ready copy to send to a local printer. I learned word processing before Windows existed, with five and a quarter inch floppy disks and the Wordstar control codes I've never stopped using. I moved on gradually, as each new iteration of Windows appeared. I was never a computer expert, but I learned to do the things that were useful to me, particularly the creation of worksheets and language teaching resources. I rejoiced as it became easier to incorporate images, and later, as we moved from overhead projectors to digital whiteboards, found my way around the increasing sophistication of Powerpoint. P was also an early enthusiast for the Internet, using Compuserve and later acquiring one of the early bt email addresses as we listened to the whirs and beeps of dial-up internet. I learned gradually as things moved on, became frustrated at times certainly, but embraced new developments and saw their value to us. I never thought of myself as a dinosaur.

More recently, though, we've seen digital exclusion looming as more and more services have become dependent on apps available only for iOS or Android, while we, happy with our Windows computers and broadband and trying to live sustainably and avoid the worst excesses of throw-away consumerism, have been reluctant to accept the high cost and limited life-expectancy of mobile technology. After almost four years of mostly staying at home in an area with generally poor cellphone coverage, the arguments for portable access to everything imaginable have seemed a little thin, and I'm terrified of an expensive device which contains all the information I most need being lost, stolen or dropped on our hard tiled floor, and of unwittingly running up huge bills for data I didn't know I was using. P says I'll enjoy the camera, and I'm sure he's right. I think it will take a little longer for me to make friends with the rest of it.