Gadgets have become synonymous with both social status and bare bones function over the past few years. While you used to get labeled as a nerd if you packed anything more technologically sophisticated than a watch, nowadays you have a lot of additional leeway for all kinds of different gizmos that might make your pockets bulge out. But of course, while everybody knows that having the latest and the greatest gadgets in your hand makes you look cool, there are other reasons why they are so popular. For one thing, they help us to stay connected to other people out there, no matter how far away out there might be. For another, they allow us to do fun things, and access useful information, no matter where we might happen to be. And for still another reason, the gadgets that we carry allow us all to get more done in our days.
If you have ever tried to find the time to talk with all of the people you consider to be your friends, you have undoubtedly noticed that it is next to impossible for a group of adult people to regularly align their schedules into something which resembles order. It can be extremely tough to get a group of friends together and just relax as a group. So we text each other on a regular basis, and we hope that this sort of “connection” is enough to keep the relationship workable. And every so often we send each other e-mails, to make sure that the connection can work in more than a hundred characters or so.
But relationship maintenance is not the only defense of gadgets in our daily lives. For another thing, the sheer volume of different actions that these objects can allow us to perform simply boggles the mind. You can make dinner reservations, plan a multiple point trip, book your next couple of flights and hotel stays, check your bank account balance… and then get back to your driving. While it is not exactly safe, it is just too convenient for most people to resist doing that.