Recently my smart phone crashed.  Contact information gone.  Calendar vanished.  Text messaging history obliterated.  While some of the data had been preserved on the SIM card, much of it couldn’t be transferred to the new phone because the charge port on the old one had broken. So I had to start from scratch, reprogramming my new Android and reconstructing from memory, as best I could, all the details holding my life together.

OMG!   I panicked in a way I knew was entirely excessive but also sadly indicative of just how much we’ve all come to rely on technology to manage our daily existence.

Until then I hadn’t thought of myself, a so-called digital immigrant, as someone who’d become totally assimilated into the culture of 21^st century communication.  I don’t prefer texting to calling.  I keep a paper calendar to back up my electronic one.  I’d rather phone a restaurant to make a reservation than book it on Open Table.  And I can’t completely rely on my phone’s GPS to get me to unfamiliar destinations, especially since it’s led me astray a few too many times late at night.  Yet without my phone and all its capabilities, I felt completely unmoored.  Rudderless.

I’m plenty old enough to remember life before cell phones.  Before personal computers, even.  The recent death of Steve Jobs generated slews of reflections on how much his contributions to technology have changed the way we live.  So I’ve found myself musing about how different it used to be before we were so connected.

When I was in college, for instance, I spent an agonizing ten hours waiting for friends to meet me at a train station in Milan.  I had no way of contacting them, and no way of knowing if they’d ever arrive.  They might have gotten into an accident.  They might have gotten arrested.  They might have gotten lost.  I paced, looked at the clock, and contemplated my options.  Should I leave?  Find a youth hostel?  Unroll my sleeping bag on a bench in the station?  As I was about to venture out into the night to look for a place to stay, they drove up.  I don’t even remember why it had taken them so long to get there.  All I can recall is the overwhelming relief and joy I felt at their arrival.

In the retelling, this incident sounds as quaintly old-fashioned as a buggy ride.  Or the famous literary story arcs, no longer plausible, which unfolded from similarly crossed signals and miscommunications. Think of Romeo and Juliet.  Had Friar Tuck been able to text Romeo about Juliet’s potion-induced coma instead of sending a messenger who failed to deliver the news in time, the young lovers could have been spared their tragic fate.  And how about Candide, who might never have embarked on the harrowing journey to reunite with his beloved Cunégonde had he been able to stay in touch with her through Skype?

Nowadays, the wealth of information at our fingertips and options for instant communication leave far less to chance.  There’s more certainty, to be sure.  But we’ve also lost a little magic.  That is, unless our phones die.  Then, just imagine the dramatic possibilities.