No "App" For What Matters

Apparently, to my amazement, there is an "app" (application, for the rubes among us; see my hand raised?) for damned near everything you can imagine. Any piece of information your little heart might desire to have, there's an "app" for it, accessible on these little devices called iPhones (which Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple invented), or iPads which connect you to the Cloud of Unknowing called the wireless internet. You can access TV shows, games, news, video, movies (of course, why anyone would want to watch "Avatar" on such a tiny device is beyond me), even your friends.

Of course if you don't have friends, there's not an app for that, is there?

What if you're inherently anti-social (which a shocking number of people are)? Is there an app for a personality? Does having your own app make you a better person? Donald Trump has his very own app, which shouldn't surprise anyone. What should surprise us is that it doesn't try to fire the other apps. Does anyone believe he's a better person for it? Did anyone sane believe he was much of anything when he was building casinos and naming them after himself?

I was thinking the other day about a USA Today article from back in November 2010. We now have more connectivity that ever, it said. But we're also less connected than ever. I thought it was a curious irony then. I still do. Now I'm not knocking technology even though it seems that I am here. Technology is an awe-inspiring thing. But like a lot of people, I worry about our technology getting the better of our humanity. Einstein worried about it. A good deal of sci-fi art and film and fiction is concerned with this, and not without reason. Because as I was reminded recently at a funeral, the things that matter can't be reduced to an icon on a computer, wireless or otherwise.
A man lost his wife at that funeral.
No app for that.
Two young men lost their mother.
No app for that.
A woman lost her sister.
No app for that.

All kinds of connectivity, but there's no app for connections, and no one can build it.
All of the marketing that says otherwise is not telling you the truth. I mean, seriously. Are you going to watch your kid being born on your iPad, or are you going to get thee to the hospital post haste? Or your granddaughter at her first dance recital? You want a text of that? Or are you going to find the school? We don't need another "phone to save us from our phones". There's no app for experience up close and personal of the things that matter. There's no app for the things that feed your soul. And thank God for that.

More Later
KCD