Einstein's fear

A friend just sent me an email with no message other than pictures:

      

             

        

Lots of folks smarter than me have wondered in print what’s happening to interpersonal—that is, one-on-one, face-to-face—interactions in this age of the smart phone. Smart phones are the new sliced bread, the new better mousetrap, and apparently, the new BFF. Amazing little computers that allow us not only to make calls and share pictures but also to check email, exchange text messages, surf the web, locate ourselves in space, and play games. They also provide a full-service, on-demand time-filler and conversation replacement. One that (seemingly) grants us both means and permission to ignore the people around us. The people with whom we presumably wanted to spend time … but maybe not so much.

Before I launch into this topic, which is bound to stir some resistance among smartphone users (like myself), let me hasten to say I’m not just being a cranky old Luddite, crying “technology is the devil’s playground”! I am happily stunned by the speed of technological innovation, and I honestly don’t belong to the camp that thinks it’s universally (or even largely) a bane, a pox on our social world. On the contrary, I celebrate the access to information and the opportunities for (which is not the same as the inevitability of) enhanced human contact that these new technologies offer.

In fact, I'm an admitted smart-phone carrying believer in the great value of multi-faceted “cyber connectedness.” I love having the Internet at my fingertips. I’ve had many a fun moment with friends looking up some obscure bit of information as we talk over lunch or coffee. I’ve also hunted down restaurants and shops, medical information and book reviews, and all sorts of other valuable kernels on my phone. I’ve used the map function to get myself located when I wandered from my google map directions. I often take advantage of the ability my phone gives me to stay in touch with email—in fact. I rely it to let me know when I have editing work waiting for me. And of course I use my smart phone’s camera a lot, its main purpose being to take pictures for this blog. Going back to its aboriginal use, I sometimes actually receive or make phone calls on it. I know plenty of  folks (myself included) who’ve been in situations where the ability to make a phone call anywhere, anytime has been helpful, important, or even critical. And that’s on top of times when it’s just nice.

So I’m not condemning these gadgets out of hand. I’m not even berating people for using them regularly and frequently. (Although I recently came across an emerging criterion for how many phone-checks per day constitutes “compulsive phone use,” and I may know some folks who come close.) No, my personal discomfort with smartphone use is more specific. It has to do not with the fact or frequency of phone use, but with the context. Basically, my personal concern has two parts, the first pretty concrete, and the second more abstract. They are (1) the preoccupation that morphs into impolite and thence to borderline rude phone use and (2) the curious need to always be somewhere other than where we are.

My first concern about this trend is depicted in the photos above. Here are folks (almost all of them youth, but I know plenty of adults could fill in just as well) who are spending their time “with” friends, but all of them are ignoring those friends in favor of their phones. I’m sure you’ve seen this, too, whole tables of folks having a meal “together” and all of them are on their phones, doing email, texting, surfing, playing games. “Why,” I want to ask them, “why are you ignoring the people you’re with in favor of ‘social’ time with someone else? Can’t it wait?”

Imagining myself in such a group, I would be feeling simultaneously hurt and angry. The hurt part would feel like the other person was being a bit impolite and might want to say, gently, “Could we please spend this time we have together actually being together?” The angry part would see the other person as sort of rude and might say, firmly, “You know, if you really don’t want to spend time here with me, then let’s not pretend we’re spending time together and go on about our lives.” Fortunately, I have been blessed (so far) with friends who don’t have this obsession. I say “fortunately” because I’m not good at such confrontations, and I fear I would just retreat from the friendship in question. After all, why spend time being not with someone you came to spend time with? Still, if this trend continues, I could end up pretty lonely.

But it's not just that being engaged is a kinder way to do relationships. Einstein's comment above points to something important, something we actually know about how people learn and think. It turns out that from infancy right up through old age, our ability to think clearly and in complex ways is fostered by direct social interaction. When Einstein says he fears that technology could bring “a  generation of idiots,” he could be citing a large body of research. So this makes me wonder: will smart phones, ironically, make us dumber? Or will they make us, as their name implies, smarter because we have easy access to so much information, so many sorts of interactions?

My second, more abstract concern has to do with our apparent need always to tune out what’s going on in real life by tuning into something, somewhere, someone else. I first thought about this when ear buds started sprouting from peoples’ heads. I'd see someone taking a walk on a lovely day, next to a bubbling stream, the sounds of kids and dogs playing all around—and they're lost in some other auditory domain. Heck, I’ve even seen folks at concerts wearing ear buds. Cellphones with texting capacity gave a boost to this practice of absence, and smart phones have bumped it up another level.

The common thread I’m trying to catch here is our seeming discomfort with just being in the world that we’re in—and the concomitant need to find someplace else to be. What’s that about? I don’t want to do a simplistic “be here, now” thing. I just wonder why we are so captured by things that take us to somewhere other than where we are. Is it because we can freely chose those other places, people, activities, whereas the ones in our actual, present environment are forced on us against our will? Is it because that other world is better than this world? Are we so dissatisfied with this place, these people, these sights and sounds? 

Or, to think about it another way, what are we avoiding when we escape into our phones? Are our relationships so empty that they need no tending and invite escape? Are our daily routines so numbing that we look for excitement, novelty, stimulation in a palm-sized screen and tiny buttons? What does this say about how we attend to and nourish our social world? Can't those other worlds wait while we spend some time in this one? Or are our lives so exhausting that we crave escape into some less stressful sort of interaction—or into no interaction at all? 

This is a real question: How do we explain to ourselves our absence from our own lives, especially when we disappear in the company of others? 

And, to return to the pictures, what do you suppose Einstein would say about all this? Maybe we have a new slogan, to be embossed as a reminder on smart phone cases: “WWES?”