iDon’t Care About Your iPhone
The iPhone — a seemingly miraculous piece of technology that has shaped the way we look at mobile phones. There isn’t anything this little hand-held device can’t do — yet. Except maybe cause a giant tear in all of human interaction. You can hardly walk down the street without seeing someone with their iPhone, BlackBerry, Drooid, Sidekick glued to their finger tips.
This is no revelation on my part. There have been countless and perhaps will be endless amounts of research in the coming years that will unveil our generation’s social interaction and lack of human communication has “somehow” managed to dwindle. No surprise there. I can save the research institutes years of focus groups and research funds by telling you that, that “lack of human contact” is already here.
Maybe it’s because I live in highly populated, dense city where you can’t help but always be surrounded by 100s of people. The concept of “personal space” and the value behind it— hardly exists here. Yet, everywhere I look, no matter what I’m doing, there is someone fervently texting, checking their iPhone, listening to their ubiquitous white headphones and lost in their own little realm. Admittedly, with the lack of “personal space” in the city — it could quite possibly be the only means to our salvation and our only slice of sanity when constantly faced with the rat race of Manhattan.
And in lieu of sounding like being a hypocrite, there is one thing that I have become more conscious of in the past few months— that is not letting my iPhone stand in the way of human interaction.
How many times have I met up with friends and their smart phone sits resting complacently on top of the dinner table? I’ve actually ended up losing count one night on the number of times he/she checked the phone in the course of our 15 minute conversation. Not only is it rude, but it’s frustrating to know that there is no restraint to check a text, re-load our latest E-mails and update our Facebook status. Is it really that important to your 32498342 “friends” that you just picked spinach out of your teeth?
Likely not, but somehow our compulsive need to pick up that device has become our safety blanket in times when the real “social” medium becomes too “awkward” for us to confront. We’re all guilty of it. Think back to a time when you’ve been waiting for a friend outside of a destination. It’s habitual to take out your phone and start randomly flicking through it with no real intention of using it. Maybe it’s responding to a text message from a friend 2 days ago or texting that one friend you know you should call more regularly, but found that now is the most opportune time to shoot them a text to catch up. Maybe you’re checking your work E-mail for the 5th time since you left work or updating your Facebook status for the 15th time today.
We’ve become a society dependent on our handhelds to solve our social apprehensions, discomfort and feelings of inadequacy. So what are we so afraid of and why are we so willing to let the tangible relationships we have cave in the face of incessantly picking up our iPhone to see if we have missed a text or E-mail? The truth is, I have become increasingly frustrated with friends’ and even those random folk at the gym, bars and restaurants being so disconnected from reality and hinging on the prospect that someone will invent an app to solve their next conundrum. I’m talking to the guy checking his email while on the elliptical, the girl who checks her phone between every 10 crunches as if she’s missed out and the friend who keeps the phone on the dinner table in hands reach should the familiar blue light shine to indicate a text message, voicemail or E-mail.
If we spent half the time we obsess over our phones and invested it into human interaction and the real “social” medium that is conversations—we’d likely be a better fit society. Fit to communicate effectively, open the door for a stranger, increase our odds of meeting a significant other and possibly listen to what it is our friends are saying. I mean really listen, not just hear. I feel for my 12-year-old brother’s generation who will undoubtedly rely on a text message to fulfill any means of effectively communicating. Think about the missed opportunities.
All I’m saying is that perhaps we should evaluate what is really important and rid ourselves of this habitual need to keep our eyes and fingers glued to touch screens. Invest a little more into actually being satisfied with our current situation and resist the urge to check our phones. At some point, it is my theory, we will have this unbelievable backlash on all of the pieces of our “world” we deem necessary.
People will return to reading the newspaper, crave a hardcover book vs a kindle, write a letter vs sending an email, arrange to meet for coffee vs just sending a text and have a conversation vs simply passing the time in between text messages. IDon’t care you have an iPhone, but then again they haven’t developed an app for curing our social discomfort that comes with parting from our phones. Or have they?
-Druster
