I texted a friend the other day and he called me back and told me not to text him anymore. When I asked why, he told me “because I’m not a sixteen year old girl”. The reality of it was, he was fighting technology. I told him he was also fighting himself and good sense by using a flip phone when touch screen phones exist that don’t require a flip before a text or a call.
When he opens that phone, he does it with a wrist snap as if he’s in South Central at midnight with a switch blade. Maybe it’s the whole Captain Kirk thing where he thinks he’s piloting the Enterprise and using those flip-phone-like communicators which would explain why he spends so much time in his Lazy Boy in front of the big screen television and why he likes the automatic doors at the grocery store that made the swoosh sound.
In marketing, I learned that people can be placed into four categories when new technology is released. First, there are the early adopters. These are the people who waited on line outside the Apple store when the iPad 2 was released. They comprise 13.5% of the people who will buy. They absorb the brunt of the costs and work out the majority of the glitches that the rest of the world doesn’t want to deal with. They are also the people who annoy the hell out of you showing you the new gadget that they purchased 15 seconds ago. Then they bash the technology they were using yesterday which is coincidentally the same thing you are using by saying “you still using that crap?” Occasionally they get stuck with a product that no one actually wants. These are the people who bought the first iPod touch (smart move) and they would show you the movies they could carry in their pocket. They also bought the Betamax, laserdiscs, and toeless socks that can be worn with sandals which I believe are popular in Germany.
The next group is the Unsilent Majority based on the famous Paulie quote from Rocky IV. They comprise 54.3% of buyers. These are the people who do buy but pretend they had the item all along, and they never shut up about it. They’ll tell you stories about how they were the first one to have it and that they’ve been using it for years even when the item was released six months oldago.
The third group is the Latent Adopters. They make up 28.7% of the total. These are the people who buy because everyone else has it and they don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t. They pretend they don’t care but they make sure you know that they finally have the technology. These are the people who still wear their blue tooth device as if they’re gang colors. They are so self important that they can’t miss a split second on the phone even though I never see them talking to anyone.
Then there are the Never Adopters also called the it’ll come back around people who believe they are so intelligent, they are beyond technology. Their thinking that if they wait it out long enough, the old technology will come back in style, at least in theory. In some cases they’re right. We were all campers before some guy built a house and now we don’t camp because we have four walls and a roof so now only people with money camp to prove to everyone that they have so much money they are beyond their big house with its own zip code. I guess they got so bored with locking doors and having heat and running water that they decided to put their entire family in a small cloth room, take baths in a cold stream and pee in the woods for the weekend. The people who hung with the horse as their mode of transportation through the whole automobile fad, had their patience pay off eighty years later when rich people traded their Mercedes with cowhide seats for a horse with a cowhide saddle. The horse is somewhat different than the rotary dial phone the Never Adopters are still clinging to like a reserve chute when their main chute doesn’t open.
So my friend got his flip phone and sat on it like it was an environmental sit-in. I’m not sure why he upgraded to the flip phone and why he didn’t move past it to a Blackberry or a smart phone. And what had he upgraded from? Was it another cell phone or was he a calling card guy or could it have been the two way pager? And why leave the fax for email? And at some point, we all stopped writing letters. When was the last time any of us picked up a pen and a stamp to communicate with another?
In the days before computers and cell phones and email and even the pony express, people communicated through the pop by. You’d hear a knock at the door and open it without knowing who was on the other side. It could be your best friend or the tax collector. Then the peephole was invented and later came the privacy door for the peephole.
Technology has given us so many opportunities to get connected and stay connected yet we use these tools to keep people at a distance. There are so many ways for people to reach us and even more ways to screen them and keep them away. There is text and phone and email and Twitter and Facebook and most of us have phones that can access all of these and more. Even if someone uses every one of these methods to reach out to us, we can always say “I didn’t check my email” or “I’m never on Facebook” or “I dropped my phone in the toilet and I lost your number” or “I had no signal and my phone had no charge and the sun was in my eyes and my dog ate my homework.”
My friend who hates technology left me a voice mail which when I listened to on speaker phone and my voice recognition software sent a text to my email which Twittered my Facebook wall which Skyped my printer, but I’m out of ink. I think I’ll just drop by and say hi.
