ON A trip to Auckland, I watched air passengers with smug smiles using the latest app technology on their smartphones to swipe their boarding pass bar code before heading down the airbridge. In fact, the queue to "swipe" was bigger than the queue for those, like me, with a printed-out boarding pass and a desire to make human contact with a real person.
The suggestion that those who use older technology are simply clinging to the past is a knee-jerk reaction that makes no allowances for our culture. The Air New Zealand ad shows a well-dressed man walking non-stop from the sidewalk to the plane, using smartphone apps to smooth the way, right up to the "swipe" with a cellphone and a smile. But if this was really the desire of the market, why is it that most of us like to get to the airport early? Fear of missing a flight, and allowances for traffic are part of the worry, but in actual fact airport meandering is fun. Super-tech is so efficient that you can put complications out of your mind, allowing you to focus on your work, your job. Well, a lot of us like a bit of time out from that and, frankly, I'm not so willing to let my cellphone and apps have free rein. I still remember, on a previous business trip, my general manager coming to a halt at the airbridge after the app failed to work.
The "future" portrayed in science fiction movies of the 70s never eventuated, and there's a cultural reason as well as a technological one. Theoretically, with digital watches swamping the market in the 70s owing to the revolution of the silicon chip, by now everyone would be wearing the finest generation of that tech. They had stopwatches, they beeped, they linked in with atomic clocks in space. Yet, digital watches are retro, almost passe, catering for athletes and military types. We choose the inefficient analogue watches because ultimate efficiency is uninteresting, and unnerving. It would be easily possible to have super-houses with systems all connected by a computer network. Honestly, I prefer to chop wood for the fire, not live in a spaceship.
So never feel out of touch if you don't have the latest smartphone, app, or technology. You're probably more in touch with the human race than you realise.
