City Of God 6

It is in common parlance these days that smartphones are the New Tobacco. They are addictive. Maybe not toxic, though with some of the concerns that have been raised in the fringe scientific circles and in even more established places, some of the materials used to make these phones, especially the mineral coltan, are actually dangerous and could lead to a rising incidence of cancer in phone users. It's wait and see, I suppose, but meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft have almost everyone by the short hairs. These phones were intentionally designed to be addictive. I say ALMOST everyone. I don't have a smartphone, Gentle Reader, and for a couple of reasons. For one thing, they are expensive, still, though even people on low incomes seem to be able to afford one. But because they no longer have a landline, I suppose. Neither do they travel on vacation every year as I do. I am on a low income, working poor, but because I do without certain luxuries, such as a smartphone, brand new clothes every month or two, eating in restaurants, going to shows and concerts and not having or needing a car, combined with the very low rent I pay in my subsidized apartment (made even lower now that I'm officially a senior), I can actually go down to Costa Rica or other Spanish speaking places for a month every year. But here I digress. It has come out that your smartphones have been intentionally designed to trap and addict you, or should I say, enslave you. In Spanish, as I playfully commented to two of my Mexican friends, the word for wife is esposa and the word for handcuffs is esposas. So I said to my friends that smartphones are both their esposa and their esposas. I see this in public everywhere. One friend commented recently that if you are not hunched over your dear little phone while out alone in public, people are going to think there is something wrong with you, that you are some kind of misfit or loser. but I'm not worried. Everyone else is so preoccupied with whatever they're seeing on their dear little masters they're not even going to notice that I don't have a phone. Outside of their tiny little screen that represents their entire little world, I don't expect they are going to see or notice much of anything. Which is my point. I mentioned recently to on of my Mexican friends that the whole bleak irony about this technology, is that it doesn't really do anything to unite us as people in a community, but much to fragment and divide us from one another. I say this because, you can be seated anywhere on a bus or in a café, surrounded by strangers, but you and almost everyone else will instead choose to communicate with others who are not there with you. Evolutionarily speaking, we are not designed for this kind of interaction. We are naturally, and primally oriented to respond, and communicate with those to whom we are physically present and vice-versa. There are all kinds of subtle cues from odor and scent, to subtle body language, facial expressions and sheer personal energy that are not going to be detected on a phone, nor a video screen but by physical presence and physical contact in the here and now. There could be something really unhealthy about this kind of split in our attention: those we care about or feel otherwise connected to are not going to impact us, nor us them by our physical presence as we are talking on the phone, while we obstinately ignore one another as strangers on the same bus or in the same room whose subtle signals of physical presence are doing all kinds of things to connect us or repel us or otherwise intrigue us and we are not even going to give each other the time of day, because we are addicted to our phone technology that keeps us neurotically connected twenty-four/ seven with people who are not present with us. and this is what it is that makes it an even greater challenge in this notoriously unfriendly city (the late actress, Elizabeth Taylor, once described Vancouver as a very beautiful woman without a personality). There is a greater, unseen reality to our experience as a city, and their is something very sacred about our physical presence with one another that helps connect us to that reality. This isn't to diss using technology to stay connected with people far away, and I know this from the marvels of Skype that has helped me make some really wonderful friends in Latin American countries. By the same token, it behooves us to also learn to not use this technology as an excuse for ignoring the people around us, because just one day, they might be needing our help, or we will be needing theirs, and you know something, Gentle Reader? Everyone is going to be too busy talking on their little phone masters to people who aren't their, if they are not checking their Facebook status, sending a tweet about the awful disaster that has just happened, or taking selfies, to even bother to notice that you have just fallen on the pavement, or are being threatened by someone. This is already happening in our cities. Every single day. And this makes us all the more afraid of one another, and all the less likely to participate in the dance that is just waiting to be choreographed in our actual presence.