Smartphones, mobiles or cells have caused many to let slip their once people-social and people-busy lives. We are now sure to take our senders and receivers with us in an extra pocket that we previously never used and, in some cases, never even knew we had. Some of us even take a specially purchased bag out in order to keep our hands relaxed, yet ironically keep one of them firmly on that bag’s clasp so as not to feel it opened by another’s unwelcome paw in the street.
‘Hands free’ is now a nonsensical phrase, as we take our devices out so often that our previously hassle-free appendages are now busier than ever. The phone is something that we can no longer leave home without. Reaching for it by the bedside lamp in the morning has become more than habitual and has led to a newly defined panic should it not be there. If by chance it should ever be left at home, we will always find more time than the day offers to drive back for it.
Articles via our phones have clearly changed our reading structure over the past ten years. The new-style headline with its missing subject means that our perfected skimming-finger scroll is now indispensable. There is no reading pleasure in leisure anymore, for we are forced to trudge on with our information gathering, suffering the minutes that we only want to tap-dash through in seconds.
Journalists absolutely need us to make it through their work, but they know that we won’t read on beyond that headline if the subject has already been set. Chords of commercials and infuriating pop-ups now throw not only products but also new news at us, and the media moguls make their money regardless of worthwhile content. We have been covertly herded into a time of premeditated reading, cutting informed attentiveness in half every day, and springing into action with those who disagree.
I can’t imagine a time before in which we suffered this level of literary abuse. Chatting, backbiting, smearing, slandering, and playing Judas have become near-professional texting hobbies. Should we have an opinion? Yes, for we are continents away from the author with our clandestine pseudonyms, so who cares if we joust from the left or the right? Morality’s bridge over to please others is weakening anyway.
The cell phone is the only brainchild I can think of that was designed with a clear goal, yet succeeded by scoring for the other team. Every invention that we have developed so far has achieved what it was supposed to: cars have speeded up journeys, medicine has cured symptoms, and sofas have afforded us a way to relax.
The smartphone, however, surely designed to bring us all closer together, has separated us beyond even its own creator’s imagination. It has isolated communication, locked-up messaging, and has cut and coded all we are saying – so much so that a return to hieroglyphics is not far out of mind.
Soon there will be no more schools, and everything will be on our screens in the street, transferable in seconds to be revised by the coding on the lampposts as we pass them, or downloaded as we drive. The humble pen, once held tightly for making notes for that investigative and discipline-proving university thesis, will very soon disappear entirely.
Our cell’s scanning and plagiarising will be routinely sucked into the ‘Reorganise’ app and sent to a site to be perused for the words that it originally scanned. This will ensure that everyone’s project is exactly the same, with grades decided by only the speed at which this whole process can be managed. Anyone who is not fast enough at operating their mobile, has a slow connection speed that day, or does not have the correct app from that virtual university will only have the chance to become one of our blue-collar labourers of today.
Adversely, this regurgitation will mean that it might not be the hands-free but the hands-on who excel. The punctual plumber, the precise painter, and the careful cleaner will be the multi-millionaires in this world.
In reproach of all of my ‘against’ wiles, I must acknowledge that my self-labelled ‘pocket burden’ is always here and handy. The open change that has come with it has always been here and will always come again, for there was surely a time when very primitive paper came to the home and parents were at the sword’s edge watching their children putting their soapstone markers and slate pads away.
There must have also been a time when shop proprietors were screamed at for clogging up happy neighbourhood streets with carts and customers, taking business away from the stand-alone vendor. The phone might just be a part of another example of this societal open change – a modification that is maybe not necessary but has dropped in anyway, just to show itself and to ask how we are doing, rather like the daytime clock on the microwave.
As we design apps, add features, update systems, speed up connectivity, maximise memory, and have it start our cars for us, the mobile’s accrued achievements list and all the seconds that it has hoarded from its shortcuts have unfortunately left us with time that we no longer have anything to say in.
It is for this reason alone that I still don’t believe we can consider this veiled yet logoed case an item of progress, although it is having a damn good try.
