“Damn! Where is
it?” muttered a fellow chaplain at a
recent meeting as he frantically pawed through his briefcase. From
the degree of his anxiety, I thought he had lost his wedding ring or an irreplaceable
document.
He met my
questioning look of concern with a sheepish grin, “I forgot my smart
phone. I just can't function without it. I feel like I don’t have any
pants on!”
While I
felt for my beleaguered colleague, I couldn’t relate to his angst at being separated
from a relentless barrage of e-mails for a few hours.
However much
modern technology promises to connect us and make our lives easier, that
promise often goes unfulfilled. We seem
more stressed out and separate from each other than ever. I’ve observed people
sitting around a table, obsessively fiddling with their tablets or phones
instead of conversing with each other. The nightly news regularly airs the latest video
of someone getting shot in the back or beheaded. And while a cat playing
piano on U tube goes viral, there are whole invisible populations getting
quietly wiped out by genocide or starvation.
Apparently, as the movie Birdman so brutally points out, if you’re not
trending, tweeting, hash-tagging, or posting, you’re irrelevant and don’t
exist.
In a culture which grows increasingly dependent on the latest personal devices, I fear that the day of George Orwell’s Big Brother and the Machiavellian scheming of Hal the computer has finally arrived. I saw a piece on CBS Sunday morning that featured yet another “must have” gadget. You wear it on your wrist—it tracks your every move—it tells you how many calories you burn and how many hours you slept. It gives you motivational pep talks and vibrates every hour reminding you to get off your butt and move around. The reporter wryly commented, “It’s like living with your mother.” When it was demonstrated that this information can be made public for the whole world to see, she asked, “Does the need for this gadget reflect an unhealthy level of self-absorption?”
Good
question, one I’ve been asking a lot lately because I suspect that all of these ingenious
doodads are ,indeed, cultivating a society of inconsiderate
boorish narcissists.
Case in
point, last week, my husband Frank and I treated ourselves to a couple of days
at Ojo Caliente Hot Springs in New Mexico, which is supposedly a sacred and
quiet place of utter relaxation and freedom from worldly distractions. Yet we
noticed that the rule banning cell phones from the pool area went largely
ignored. On the way home from New Mexico
we stopped for lunch at a small café in the mountain town of Buena Vista
Colorado. Not two feet away from our
table sat a young couple loudly “face timing” on their computer. We had no desire to eavesdrop on their conversation,
but we were pretty much a captive audience, forced to listen to the intimate
details of their lives intruding upon our lunch. The whole time, they remained
clueless that they were bothering anyone.
I dread the day when air travel becomes even more of an affront to human
dignity once they allow the use of cell phones in flight.
Call me old-fashioned, but I would prefer that
people leave my face to their imagination during a phone conversation and I
like to keep my conversations private (remember the days of private phone
booths?). Nor do
I need to globally broadcast what I ate for lunch, not that anyone
besides Frank would be remotely interested in my diet. I still like to navigate with a clunky paper
map that doesn’t fold right after the first time you use it. At
least it doesn’t talk back and slyly insinuate what a dummy I am when I make a
wrong turn. And I certainly don’t need an expensive apparatus overseeing my daily activities, much less suggesting that I’m lazy for lying
on the couch hours on end.
Back in the
olden days, I traveled the world when Al Gore was only dreaming of the Internet. I stayed connected with family and friends
through Fax, snail mail or international calling cards. I managed to find my
way around with a dog-eared Lonely Planet travel guide, or by asking people for
directions. Yeah, it was inconvenient
and even scary at times to be all alone and thousands of miles from home, yet
that was part of the adventure.
Just so you know, I'm not blind to the obvious benefits of these technological advances nor am I adverse to incorporating some of them into my life. Even
if I’m only taking a walk in the park three blocks away, my “dumb” phone goes
with me; I can’t imagine life without e-mails, especially when I’m traveling in
a foreign country. I text, and of course, I’ll post this blog on my Facebook
page. But that’s as far as I’m willing
to go right now despite the attempts of friends and family to shame me into keeping up
with the times. I've learned to ignore the bemused,
slightly pitying glances every time I whip out my antiquated cell phone. When it finally dies, I guess I'll have to give in and invest
in a smart phone. Until then, I remain skeptical
that a device smarter than me will enrich my life and enhance my relationships.
