Weve all been there. Youre out with a group friends for a meal and someone whips out their iPhone, Crackberry or Android. Your lunch companion is suddenly lost to the cloud. He or she is physically present, but their attention has gone altocumulus.
Years ago, you would have needed a clunky old landline and a business account to put others on hold. Now you can do it wirelessly with people sitting right across from you. Thats not my preference. When I get together with people in meatspace, my intention is to converse, not to put my head down and flutter my thumbs back and forth like a fidgeting meth addict.
There are growing numbers of people who would rather interact with their smartphone than other human beings, observes Lisa Merlo, director of psychotherapy training at the University of Florida. Watching people who get their first smartphone, theres a very quick progression from having a basic phone you dont talk about to people who love their iPhone, name their phone and buy their phones outfits, she observed in an AP news story.
Walk into the electronics section of any big retail outlet and youll find entire racks devoted to stylish jackets for smartphones. Tellingly, you can even buy little baby outfits for iPhones. I have little doubt some people feel more bonded to their gleaming gadgets than their carbon-based relatives. In her new book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, author Sherry Turkle interviews a wide range of people, from teens to seniors, to parse the social effects of mobile technology. Its a sobering read.
These days, being connected depends not on distance from each other but from available communications technology, the author observes. Most of the time, we carry that technology with us. In fact, being alone can start to seem like a precondition for being together because it is easier to communicate if you can focus, without interruption, on your screen.
Turkle points to a familiar scene in coffee shops: most of the patrons are in silent communion with their fetish objects, like postindustrial monks. At a coffee shop a block from my home, almost everyone is on a computer or a smartphone as they drink their coffee. These people are not my friends yet somehow I miss their presence. (Ironically, I sometimes bring my laptop to a coffee shop just for the ersatz social atmosphere while I do freelance work. So how am I different from anyone else?)
Turkles daughter confessed to her mom how she prefers texting over answering the phone because person-to-person talk offers no control over the communication. That anecdote reminds me of a friend whose daughter lost her laptop in an apartment break-in. It wasnt the loss of the computer itself that troubled her most, but social access. Ive lost all my friends, she confessed to her dad. She meant her friends on Facebook.
In the rare moments when other people grab our interest, we dont abandon our digital soothers. In scenes from Vancouvers Stanley Cup riot, a Heil Hitler salute was the most common pose in the crowds. Every other spectator held up a mobile device to record action that momentarily topped their apps in interest.
Filmed in 1971, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is a documentary record by urbanist William Whyte of mundane daily activities seen in U.S. cities. From a rooftop perspective, his camera zoomed in on people in city squares eating their lunches, conversing, reading papers, and most prominently, looking at each other. In other words, people-watching. Youd be hard-pressed today to find any urban space where gadget-viewing isnt ascendant over people-watching. Were talking about something without precedent, a stark discontinuity in human history. People in the developed world are beginning to non-interact with other people like they are objects, and interact with objects like they are people.
Star Trek was a big television hit at the time of Whytes 1971 film. Its remarkable how much todays smartphones resemble the series handheld communicators. But weve gone Mr. Spock one better with our mobile devices, combining the interactivity of the communicator with the paralyzing effect of the phaser. We walk around with our gadgets pointed inward, set to stun.
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