Free Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives by Randi Zuckerberg

so? Should I have done so? Luckily, things were less complicated back then. And besides, I looked pretty weird with someone else’s smile.
    I was fascinated with that machine. I used to try to find ways to sneak down to the office when my friends were over and we would happily play a few rounds of smile swapping. Sometimes I would get caught and then I would get an earful. But it was totally worth it for a chance to play with magic.
    In seventh grade, I got my first telephone. Because mobile phones weren’t yet prevalent, it still had a cord attached to it. And okay, it wasn’t even entirely mine. During the day, it was my father’s office line. But after the dental office closed for the day, I was free to claim the line. Now I could spend evenings and weekends talking with friends for hours! Obviously, we talked about all the important topics: boys, movies, Nirvana, and Ace of Base. Sometimes I’d also have unexpected conversations with people looking for some dental work. Those conversations were less interesting.
    At about the same time, I had my first encounter with the Internet. Computers weren’t new in our house. For as long as I could remember, my dad had a couple of old machines in his office, an Atari from the 1970s and an IBM PC he’d bought at about the time I was born. I never really touched them; my father used them for storing patient records, doing office correspondence, and other serious stuff. But in the mid-1990s, my parents got a computer for my siblings and me to share.
    That first computer was big, slow, and often difficult to use. Listening to the computer cringe and wail as it dialed up to the Internet was a tedious experience, one made even more tedious by getting disconnected every time someone in the house picked up the phone. But logging on to AOL for the very first time and being able to send e-mail, search Grolier’s online encyclopedia for school projects, or instant message with my friends was life changing.
    In my senior year of high school, I got my first cell phone. It was a big, unwieldy Nokia 5110 in a lime-green case. It looked like and felt like a brick, and that’s what I called it. But, again, it opened up a new world of amazing possibilities. For the first time, the ability to reach someone and be reached wasn’t tied to a physical location. I no longer had to wait outside the east entrance to the mall for twenty minutes because my friend was at the west entrance.
    If you’re lucky, you skipped that whole dial-up Internet phase. Maybe your first phone was a smartphone. No playing Snake for hours at a time on a tiny monochrome screen. But however those moments played out, they all tell a common story. Technology and connectivity are becoming more advanced every day.
    Once it was cool to have your own landline. Now five billion people around the world have their own mobile phones, and about a billion of those are smartphones with access to the Internet, e-mail, and all the amazing apps that are available today. We’ve gone from a world where a decade ago Internet access was a novelty to one where 2.4 billion people are online. And millions more join every day.
    Devices are faster, cheaper, and more powerful than anything we could have imagined even a few years ago. In Silicon Valley, every geek is familiar with Moore’s law, named after the founder of Intel, Gordon Moore. Back in 1965, he predicted that microchips would double in power roughly every eighteen months. That prediction has remained true. Also, as computers have continued to get faster every year, the cost of devices has steadily fallen.
    This trend is what has allowed so many more people to get their hands on computers, smartphones, and tablets over the last decade, and why these devices keep appearing in ever more places. Moore’s law is what has led to billions more people getting phones and hooking up to the Internet, and why a phone today is now a hundred thousand times more powerful than the computer on