It happened again. She was headed straight towards me, completely unaware of the coming collision. Her eyes were fixated on the tiny little screen in her hand. I was in full defiance mode. I was not going to budge or swerve neither left or right to enable her stupid behaviour. If she didn't have the good common sense to look up from her precious phone before walking right into me it would be her own bloody fault. Being a nice polite Canadian, of course I would apologize profusely just as if she had just trampled on my foot. Then she did look up at me. I could see the whites of her eyes and just in time she dodged to my left. I simply shook my head and rolled my eyes. Sometimes I will chime out a very cheery "Good morning!" even if it's already four-thirty in the afternoon. In my more churlish moments they will be treated to a tart "Wake up!"
I'm not intentionally mean, or well, maybe not always, but to everything there is a limit. The sidewalks and the crosswalks are all crammed with people fastened to their phones. They seem completely unaware of their surroundings and frankly I am concerned about their safety and wellbeing. They are the Breathing While Stupid.
I often wonder just what they would be looking at on their tiny little screens that would be so fascinating. Are they doing emails? Are they updating their Facebook status? Texting? Trolling the Internet? Tweeting? Looking at Porn? There are so many interesting things and people happening in our immediate surroundings. Why this great urge to escape?
I can think of three distinct occasions where I have seen folks on their phones, all of them young men, two of them wearing sandals without socks (at least they have good fashion sense) walking right into dog shit without even noticing. One of them actually deserved it. His Dalmatian had just left a brown steaming offering on the pavement and his human was so unaware of the situation that he didn't even appear to notice where he had stepped. Then there was the fellow to whom I gave very good advance warning. He looked up, grunted "Huh?" and in went his delicate bare little toes. More recently, just after I'd returned from a month in Colombia and a month of speaking exclusively Spanish I yelled out "Cuidado!" instead of "Look out!" to another gormless young douche and of course it was too late, but at least I meant well.
We are becoming so wired to our tech toys that we are gradually forgetting that we are human beings living among other human beings. Many of us are increasingly depriving ourselves from the simple every day human contact that makes life bearable and more and more are becoming aware of this and are actually trying to do something to have face to face contact with other humans, be it a supermarket cashier, a waiter, a barista, the person standing nearby waiting for the light to change. This is how we are evolutionarily wired, not to connect to machines but to other human beings and by letting the tech companies lure us into addictive relationships to their products our most essential sense of humanity is being impacted and compromised.
Even on the radio this afternoon I listened to the guest host on the CBC Radio One program On The Coast while she interviewed a prominent tech geek. She admitted to having various instruments of isolation: a tablet, phone, something else. She no longer uses a desktop (who does?) and dissed the humble laptop as yesterday's news. Another i junkie. Like so many others with disposable income, spending on the latest device, making the medium vastly more important than the message. Oh, that's right, the medium IS the message. Thank you Mr. McLuhan.
I have two tech devices. One is a five year old laptop that still serves me faithfully. The other is a tech antique: a flip phone. That's right, Gentle Reader, this is my confession to you and the world. I use a flip phone. I carry it with me everywhere. It also helps me tell the time. It isn't mine. It is my work phone. As long as I can still hold out there is no way that I am going to carry an iPhone nor any of its tech successors on my person. I don't need to read my email every five minutes. I'm not on Twitter (who knew!) and if I still have a Facebook account then I would be the last person to know. I'm not a dinosaur and I'm certainly not an updated version of a neo-Luddite. I simply have priorities. When I am out, I am out. I am in public. I am among people, my fellow beings, or perhaps out in nature, but I will interact with my surroundings in la carne viva (living flesh) before I will try to hide myself behind a tiny phone just because I'm afraid of the people around me. My emails I can always read when I get home. It gives me something to look forward to. I call this having a life.
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