I love many of the new technologies in this digital age, or at least many of the new applications available for smartphones. My smartphone is filled with new and seemingly exciting apps. I tried Meerkat and Periscope when they first appeared. I downloaded Snapchat in its infancy. I have more “productivity” apps than I have productive things to do in my senior years.
The problem? I’m not a millennial. Oh, I don’t mind being my age, not that there’s anything I could do about it anyway. And it’s not as if I would like to be a millennial. I wouldn’t.
But none of my friends - my contemporaries - shares my interest in these new technologies. Heck, my siblings even eschew Facebook, which is hardly cutting edge these days. And in most but not all instances, you can’t really use these new apps except with others who are using the apps. With no friends who download and use them, I’m left simply to admire them, a very unsatisfying outcome.
I read Tech Crunch fairly religiously and this evening I read a post about Amity, a new interactive messaging app. Of course I had to download it, which I did. But, alas, I will be unable to use it unless or until a friend or associate downloads and uses it as well, something unlikely to happen.
I had a related “problem” when I was still “young” and working. I have always loved pens and writing so, perhaps naturally, I developed a love (some might call it a fetish but that would be wrong) for beautiful and unusual fonts in this computer age. At work I would often download stunning “new” fonts that I happened across. But, while I was able to use and admire them in my emails to colleagues and friends, they could not see the fonts in the emails unless they too had downloaded the fonts on their desktop, which, of course, they hadn’t. Fortunately, I had one former colleague who shares my passion for fonts so I was able to share the new fonts with her, she would download them, and we were at least able to enjoy and admire them in emails between us. I need at least one friend like that now so I may share these new apps with her or him. But I’m not holding my breath.
