Cyborgs

Yesterday I learned that the first thing I’d want to do upon losing my phone is to call someone and laugh about it.

Which just proves that I’m a freaking moron.

The second thing I learned was how much I’ve grown to depend on my phone despite thinking that I was completely indifferent. I mean, actually, personally I really don’t need my phone that bad – I have switched off for like whole weeks and I was fine – but professionally it’s a whole different story.

So this is what happened. I needed to leave the house by 6 in order to make it to work on time, but because I left at 6, traffic was clear so I had a whole hour before work began. And I was sleepy so I found an empty table to catch some shuteye.

Then the alarm went off with 5 minutes before class started. I picked up my stuff, went to class, had a great session – but at the end of the class, as I was about to head to my next class, I realized that that very important but taken-for-granted little pocket-sized square thing was nowhere to be found.

Apparently I was still groggy when I went to class and had just left my alarm clock on the table.

Kiddos were great and tried to help me find it. Eventually I managed to track down the cleaning ladies in charge of the area where I slept and luckily they had kept this machine on which I’m currently typing safe. But in that half hour before it was located, during the time when it was lost… I was lost.

Oh it was just miserable. It’s not even the financial aspect of replacing it, but the hassle – oh the hassle of, my God, of just everything.

We digital citizens have really evolved, haven’t we? The internet, the phones – they’re no longer simple objects that help smooth our lives – no, they have effectively become extentions of ourselves. Our memories (those thousand pictures of vacation, anniversary, childbirth), our identity (e-mails, addresses, phone numbers, bank details, contact of people who can actually verify who we are), our knowledge (Google, e-books, random snippets you’ve saved, work items, screenshot of that important info), our family & friends (just a click away, Instagram, Facebook, whathaveyou) – we no longer carry whole aspects of us on our person; we’ve privatized them to our phones.

More than that, the phone is us. When I lost the phone, I worried about being disconnected and how bothersome it would be to get reconnected to everything, not to mention losing things that are not recoverable, like those vacay pics that have not been backed up. Once I calmed down a little, I became even more scared. My e-mail is connected on my phone – what if the person who found my phone was less than honest and used my e-mail to reset my bank account passwords and everything? Because, you know, these days you can verify everything using e-mail and I stood to lose everything because I had lost my phone.

Anyway, I’m lucky the lady was honest but yeah, what a wonderfully scary and scarily wonderful thing technology is. I do not think we need to debate about whether we should allow people to become cyborgs or anything – we’re already there. If you stop and think about it, we have now become part man, part machine. Essentially, where it matters, we already are cyborgs.