As you heroically struggled onward and upward toward the peak of the harrowing tree-dotted mountaintop, the sun gleaming on your face, forcing tiny beads of sweat to elegantly slide down your cheeks, a brilliant thought suddenly emerged from the depths of your brain. What you wouldn’t give to update your Facebook status right now! Well, now you can.
In recent years, a company known as Spot Connect has manufactured a product that allows its customers to send messages via satellite, so hikers, backpackers and the like, don’t have to worry about the lack of reception in the great outdoors anymore.
This Spot Satellite Communicator costs a little under six hundred dollars and is sold with a global positioning system. Journalist Anne Eisenberg explains, “To send messages, users key the text into a GPS unit or a smartphone linked to a transmitter, which sends the message skyward to the satellite system.”
Customers are able to send short text messages and e-mails, as well as update their Facebook and Twitter accounts; however, the spot device cannot receive messages.
For an additional fifty dollars, the Spot Satellite Communicator can follow, display and recall all of the routes encountered.
I can appreciate the need for such a gadget if one is to climb Mount Everest or any other treacherous path and would like to be assured that ― if need be ― he or she can call for help when reception is lacking. However, spending up to seven hundred dollars on a piece of equipment so that one can update a status or send an insignificant text message while surrounded by the serenity and stillness of nature strikes me as unnecessary.
When I go hiking near my house in Marin County, I always make sure to leave my phone at home so no one can disturb me. This way I can truly lose myself in the beauty of the natural world. And ― as I can understand wanting to share the excitement of seeing such a sight around me ― I believe in practicing a little patience and waiting until I am home to tell my friends and family about my expeditions. In all sincerity, I feel that this contrivance is a little much.
Rebecca Eisenberg is a junior philosophy major and a columnist for the Daily 49er.
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