A World Of Smart Items

Technology is fast growing and the human being refuse to lag behind by fast adopting. One need not necessarily write a letter and send to the post office for posting. You can seat at the comfort of your home and with the click of a button your wish is done. Technology has married the massive communication gap between the ordinary Ghanaian at my village who hitherto will not have had a wave of a hand from the American at Massachusetts via online but if not for the invention of skype. With technology, the exchange of pleasantries knows no bounds- From Gambaga to Guangzhou, from Guangzhou to Gibraltar!

Technology has caused people to think outside the box and change the undoable to doable. The technologist possesses power beyond the imagination powers of a spiritualist. From android to windows, applications to solve everyday problem are competitively developed to meet the demands of the human being who is even an apple applications fan. Just look at a scenario where you can seat at Kpatinga and still monitor a football match between Real Madrid and Barcelona or American politics with the help of a smallest equipment which otherwise could not have carry the weight of Lionel Messi’s shoe lace or a piece of Donald Trump’s gray hair or even a crumb of Hillary Clinton’s red lipstick. To the view level user, this is impossible feat by tricks of abracadabra but to the inventor, it is just the application of scientific knowledge.

Technology is now a tool in academia. Technology has become pedagogues to many students who have fallen in love with video tutorials of troublesome courses on YouTube. Journalists have become watchdogs of politicians and the fact checker of the deceiver to the admiration of viewers and listeners. Journalist can now dig deep into search engines and dig out the truths within milliseconds. It has made people readers who didn’t want to read even their names. Many of my epoch has read about geniuses like Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton on Wikipedia. Technology has made people fall in love with others without any physical evaluation. They keep exchanging “His” and “Hellos” accompanied by emoji and eventually that’s it. He keeps reading her write-ups on social media and on websites and within no time, he will have revealed to you one day how he met his helpmate on social media. Technology has blessed many men and women than Pastor Mensah Otabil!

I find it extremely labyrinthine in recognizing people nowadays! They will snap pictures and edit it to your admiration only for you to take a second stance when you meet them in their physical picture. One person will become three people in one picture, the one with stygian skin becomes light-skinned, how!? They edit with photo editing applications on smart phones in a world of smart items. The photogenic perhaps will suffer a heart attack because an editing application on his device has expired and needs a renewal like the passport. At a gathering, you can’t snap a picture because you went with a phone whose camera is 0.5 mega pixels. Your choices are limited like a mendicant. You either take the picture with someone’s smart item and be in a prayer mood all the way to the house because these smart items, sometimes cannot be stretched beyond their smartness level. It can crash and you will lose all the data in the device. It is a moment of irascibility and inefficacy especially when the picture you took was with a celebrity!

The selfie-absorbed with a pose like Jackie Chan in a Chinese movie is bent on taking a selfie though the driver in the car behind him is tooting the horn because he must upload the picture on Instagram for followers to evaluate how gorgeous he is. To hell is visiting the accident and burns unit at the Tamale Teaching Hospital or even spending a fortnight at the physiotherapy unit! His targeted target must be achieved, succinct to any condoler or even the driver. An accident victim is bleeding to the extent of bleeding the last drop of blood at an accident scene, albeit, the sympathizers are sympathetic but they must take pictures too even if the percentages of their batteries is synonymous with zilch. The sympathy ends up being shared between needless obsession and human feeling which lamentably should not have been the case. The person with technophobia is from stone age. Don’t dare add up yourself to the twenty first century. They will be conversing among themselves “Charlie, I have heard that there is an app on android you can use to check your blood pressure, is that true?” and you will be having a conversation with your ‘yam’ in your heart “when will this phone stop telling me insufficient memory whenever I try opening Facebook especially when I just bought this 16GB memory card?”. Sorry, you will continue querying yourself like a database being queried until you change a smart phone or a smart item because you have failed to obey the rules of a world with smart items.

Your eyes are fixed on your device exchanging chats on WhatsApp, uploading videos on snapchat, updating a status on Facebook and twitting messages on twitter. They are talking to you but you won’t mind them. You are deafish because of a smart item. You have become a ‘human wall’ who doesn’t listen. At that moment, writing an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence to complete a write-up on Facebook is more relevant than your wife telling you “sweetheart, the food is ready”. A person will comment on a picture on social media and you will premature conclude that the person is a poet little did you know that his smart item has allowed him to copy from somewhere for pasting. People think a lot before writing on social media because of polyglots. In a group of ten people, ten people can be quite for some time as though they were observing a minute silence for a dead at a memorial service by reading breaking news on online news portals.

Technology continues to bring daylight on people more than an investigative journalist who is a member of the international consortium of investigative journalists. If Donald Trump’s 2005 lewd comments were to be a human being, he will have name it a terrorist having peerless terrorism prowess than the so called Islamic state militants. The race to the white house was getting irksome but his comments way back also found it more irksome to remain in secrecy. Hillary Clinton was not spared! Hackers in a world of smart items enjoyed cups of coffee and brought deleted emails into the public domain which apparently gave Donald Trump a message to campaign on. From Donald Trump’s lewd comments brouhaha to Hillary Clinton’s email melee, I woke up one morning to a striking victory of Donald Trump with a victory speech to “bind wounds of division and make America great again” on my smart item in Navrongo.

A world of smart items! The world has solemnly vowed to become a world of even smarter items through the inventing powers of the technologist. The world is becoming global because of the incessant effort of some Twin Brothers, Science and Technology! They work concertedly in robbing a technophile. I don’t know of you but I am an optimist unlike a nihilist. An optimist who believed that we will one day wake up and see Roborts with Humanoid features all over as the technologist who invents through biological relationship between this Monozygotic twins, Science and Technology, will not be fed up of thinking because thinking is not difficult to them as they have always finished thinking!

Ghana was burlesqued because of an excerpted disquisition by her premier on a red-letter day- You may consult your Personal Digital Assistance for its meaning, after all, we are in a world of smart items!

The writer is a confused B.Sc Computing-with-Accounting Student at University For Development Studies, Navrongo Campus.

Writer’s Email: [email protected] .