The Smartphone
When and why and what I need to know,
And how to get to where I want to go
And who is dating whom, the so-and-so,
Just ask the bloody phone, go with the flow.
I have come to realize that the smartphone is a curse.
It is so convenient and informative. It tells me the time and the weather and my whereabouts and what everybody else is doing.
But it’s a sordid boon. I am addicted to it. As a child I read for hours on end, uninterrupted. Now, when I read a book, I pause every few pages to turn on my phone and read the news, or even, I’m embarrassed to admit, my Facebook page. Chess, Wordle, crosswords, texts, and the mundane things that other people do: it’s all on the phone. And much worse.
The picture of our age - a score of people standing on a platform waiting for a train, all looking down at their phones - is no exaggeration. When I first saw it, I laughed in derision, but now I am one of them.
It's never seemed to me very smart to pay extortionate amounts of dosh every month to a sinister corporation for the privilege of being constantly surveilled, having one's personal information flogged to other sinister corporations, and having one's attention span reduced to that of the proverbial goldfish--all for the highly dubious benefit of being "connected" twenty-four hours a day to one's fellow creatures, obsessively recording every moment of our largely uninteresting lives, and persecuting others with photos and videos of our breakfasts, our cats, and, for aught I know, our cats' breakfasts. What a boon to civilisation.
ReplyDeleteOf course this technology has its advantages, but its obvious overwhelming disadvantages have been persuasively analysed. I will remain one of that smug band who walk the streets unmolested by ring-tones and who exchange companionable eye-rolls when the young woman at the front of the bus reveals to her BF that she just ovulated.
Have you tried wrapping your phone tightly in plastic, submerging it in a tub of water, and placing it in the freezer? I'm reliably informed that it works for credit-card use.