I love the Internet and the information it brings me, but I’m not on Facebook or Twitter and I don’t have a smartphone, so I’ve obviously said “no” to certain things. But will the things I’ve said “yes” be the same tomorrow? Will they be quietly remade by updating, constant updating? From “When Tech Turns Nouns Into Verbs,” Quentin Hardy’s New York Times blog post about a world in which the tools you use to measure also measure you, where things, simply put, change:

“We’re remaking the world so quickly that our language is breaking down.

Think about the phone you carry. You talk with people on it, but you can also open apps and transform it into a camera or chess board. As much as you talk on it, you use its Internet browser. In total daily usage, your phone is mostly pinging cellphone towers and Wi-Fi antennas, informing phone service providers, digital map makers and retailers of where you are.

Whatever this object is, it isn’t a phone in any conventional sense. And that may be a clue to a whole new way of thinking about the world around us.

The phone is a little connected computer — a device whose uses and meaning we continually explore and modify. It is by no means a phone in the historical sense. It is still a physical object, of course, but it is really a vehicle for one or another software-enabled experience. In an important sense, it is made to be contingent, changing with every download and update. That focus on the needs-driven experience means it behaves less like a static noun and more like an active verb.

This is becoming a commonplace across our connected world.”