"When you start thinking about taking pictures, sending an e-mail, receiving an e-mail, speaking into your phone and have it transcript voice into text and then sent as an e-mail, it's mind-boggling"
About this Quote
Mind-boggling is doing a lot of work here, and that is the point. Steve Largent, a football legend turned public official, is speaking from the vantage of someone whose formative idea of communication was physical: a playbook, a huddle, a letter, a call that stayed a call. His list of everyday phone tasks reads like a dizzy inventory of small miracles, but the rhetorical move is more revealing than the tech itself. He stacks banal actions - pictures, email, voice-to-text - into a single breathless chain to recreate the sensation of acceleration, the feeling that modern life isn’t advancing so much as piling up.
The intent is wonder, yes, but the subtext is unease disguised as admiration. By narrating these features as separate acts rather than one seamless ecosystem, he’s implicitly marking himself as an outsider to the native logic of smartphones: that everything becomes data, transferable, searchable, monetizable. His amazement isn’t just about convenience; it’s about the collapse of boundaries. Speaking becomes writing. A private thought becomes a message. A moment becomes an image, then a file, then an email attachment. The human voice gets reduced to something a system can parse and forward.
Coming from an athlete, the tone matters. Athletes are paid to trust muscle memory and split-second decisions, not to marvel at the infrastructure beneath them. That’s why the quote lands: it captures a culturally common whiplash, especially among people who’ve lived through analog-to-digital without ever asking for the upgrade. The awe is real; the anxiety is the aftertaste.
The intent is wonder, yes, but the subtext is unease disguised as admiration. By narrating these features as separate acts rather than one seamless ecosystem, he’s implicitly marking himself as an outsider to the native logic of smartphones: that everything becomes data, transferable, searchable, monetizable. His amazement isn’t just about convenience; it’s about the collapse of boundaries. Speaking becomes writing. A private thought becomes a message. A moment becomes an image, then a file, then an email attachment. The human voice gets reduced to something a system can parse and forward.
Coming from an athlete, the tone matters. Athletes are paid to trust muscle memory and split-second decisions, not to marvel at the infrastructure beneath them. That’s why the quote lands: it captures a culturally common whiplash, especially among people who’ve lived through analog-to-digital without ever asking for the upgrade. The awe is real; the anxiety is the aftertaste.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
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