You’d have to get down to around number fifty or so, in the realm of innovations like the waterbed or kimchi before the cellular phone showed up—and way farther down the list until you’d arrive at software applications for said phone.
(In fact, phone-based social media applications would probably show up in the top ten of humanity’s worst inventions, right around there with the internal combustion engine and nuclear bombs.)
Nevertheless, there is a time and place for everything (except, of course, the aforementioned nuclear bombs), and so I’m not going to complain (any more than I have already) about a piece of software that potentially keeps a person from being ditched by the group before the dangerous egress to one of Seattle’s most dangerous egresses (albeit one affording an absolutely stellar view of our own nearest star’s setting to the west on a lovely and clear late spring evening, albeit one scored a mere 4 out 10 by the New Hampshire judge).
If my little round face, crossing the front of another person’s little plastic rectangle means that I’m better able to catch up to the favored group of itinerant miscreants, then so be it; I’ll accept that.
But let us not come to depend on such technological mediations at the cost of our innate abilities to connect using only what nature has given us: eyes, ears, loud mouths, olfactory clues, (especially for those riding behind a person puffing away at a cannabis cigarette), and even those extra-sensory perceptions that somehow allow a person to show up later in the evening just by following their intuitions—(and well, sometimes by making a phone call or checking the so-called twitters.)
Technology or not, as long as we keep pedaling, we’ll meet up where we’re going, wherever that is.
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