Gripes and Grimaces

Since the mobile phone became commonplace in pockets and palms around the world, its capabilities have grown inexorably.
The Smartphone in particular has gobbled up other gadgets with a ravenous appetite. From the simple – alarm clocks and torch – to the complicated – MP3 players and cameras – there’s little the designers who design them haven’t managed to shoehorn into ever more slim line devices. 

This growing gadget convergence isn’t set to stop. The Smartphone is the most important tool in our lives, always with us and always ready to do our bidding (reception and battery allowing).

But at what cost?

Willie Foo Birthday 2012

I have some second cousins who are 18 and 21, and who live several states away from me here. Recently I visited them and their parents for the first time in several years (the younger one was graduating from high school), and found the self-absorbed little so-and-sos CONSTANTLY Face booking, texting and Twittering with their electronically-connected friends. Even when they were conversing with someone in person, they were mostly looking down at their screens and clicking away with their thumbs -- even at the dinner table. There was almost no real-life activity they considered incompatible with using their devices. They would just glance up now and then to check whether the other people present were still awake enough, or engaged enough despite their own obvious lack of interest, to justify continuing the face-to-face 'conversation'.

While I recognize that I am not part of their usual social or family circle (and am also from a different generation -- I am 45), I was still surprised that during an entire day spent in their home, neither young person asked me ONE question about me or my life.

In fact, I was privately shocked at how abominable their manners were, and at the fact that their parents seemed to accept their way of behaving as perfectly normal. Many young people appear to be ADDICTED to their devices -- and I mean this in the most literal sense. As far as I can see, they are seeking constant gratification or validation from the latest text, tweet or whatever, just as the thoughts of a drug addict rarely stray far from their next hit or fix.

It's as if they don't feel they exist in any meaningful sense if they aren't constantly connected. It's a behavioral disease, a social-come-technological pathology. If my cousins' way of being was typical, I can't help thinking that the wider implications of how they relate to other people face-to-face are quite alarming: our society will become even more fractured, self-absorbed and self-segregating than it already is as it becomes possible for all of us to have increasingly little real contact with each other.

It's paradoxical indeed that this is the consequence of the so-called 'communications revolution'. Unfortunately, its technologies have developed so fast that I feel they are actually controlling our behavior much more than they are serving us as tools. They have also allowed employers and complete strangers alike to encroach on our time, activities and privacy in a manner that would have seemed unimaginable 30 years ago. These communications technologies have provided us with tremendous convenience in many ways, but they are also imposing costs on us that we have yet to fully acknowledge and deal with.