MY IPAD IS MY WORLD

January 24, 2022

For quite some time now mobile phones have become one of the primary objects of society and living life. Nowadays just about every person (including myself) has a smartphone. When mobile phones first were released thirty or so years ago, society thought it was brilliant that calls could be made anywhere outside of home, and without the need of finding a public payphone. 

Even I, as an adult in my early thirties, have never seen a person using a payphone booth to make a telephone call in my entire lifetime. The only time when I saw anyone giving any kind of attention to them was when they were all upgraded to Wi-Fi hotspots almost a decade ago.

However in my three decades of life so far, mobile phones have advanced enormously; and now they do so much more than simply offer us an opportunity to telephone people (and those words alone are very old-fashioned now)! Rather than just calling someone by a number, people use phones for many other things too including social media, emails, monitoring their health, finding online information, purchasing things, for various kinds of utilities (like finding lost possessions and as a torch), listening to music, and throughout the Covid pandemic they are being used to check into places and show proof of vaccinations.

Yet despite all of that I still have very little interest in smartphones. I do have an iPhone, but the only time I use it is for phone calls and monitoring my sleeping patterns and my heart rate/anxiety levels (as it is attached to my Apple Watch which I definitely do get a lot out of). Whenever I have been a few days late answering calls/messages, people in their seventies and older have even said that it’s great to see that I’m not addicted to my phone, even when I was a teenager.

The truth is though that instead of not being addicted to my iPhone, I am very dependent upon my iPad! My whole life revolves around my iPad and I can never be separated from it. If it ever breaks or goes missing I feel absolutely lost. In fact those occasions of being iPad-less feel the exact same way as walking onto a battlefield without armour or protection. The reason for this is that my iPad (as it is such a versatile device) contains everything I use to relax and ground my mind, in any place I happen to be. Activities I do to relax are to watch movies/shows, read books, do mindfulness colouring, build places of the world by using Minecraft, listen to music, and to learn other languages from apps and books available on my iPad. 

As well as for relaxation I also use my iPad for work/study related video-link talks, researching information through sites and purchased books, and of course for writing blogs; which I am doing at this very moment!

So in the exact same way that many are very attached to their phones, I feel very much attached to my iPad. Whenever I see the words “scan this QR code with your phone” I often think of that as having a very nineties sound to it, and feeling irked and making a mental correction of “or scan this QR code with a (smart) device”. Scanning codes with a smartwatch would be extra convenient as the annoyance of having to hurriedly fetch around for a device in our bag or pocket would be eliminated.

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