The Tyranny of Technology (?)
The Only Thing That’s Changed Is Everything
Not that long ago I sat in a restaurant, waiting for my lunch, when I realized that I’d left my phone at the office. The most disturbing to me about this rather insignificant event was the full-out existential Angst I was overcome by. What to do? Did I even still exist if I was unreachable to the world? What if something happened? Should I go back to pick up the phone?
Luckily, I came to my senses before abandoning my lunch and racing off to collect my phone. Then I noticed that literally everybody around me was somehow doing something with their phones. Nobody was talking, everybody just sat there, completely self-absorbed in a world representing itself on a tiny screen. How did we get to this situation? Don’t get me wrong, this is not a tirade against (smart) phones or social media. As the outright panic attack described earlier should make clear, I’m just like anybody else when it comes to my phone dependency, but why?
It’s not that long ago that mobile phones were the size of a briefcase and the idea of being reachable 24/7 seemed utterly ridicules. When more reasonable mobile handsets became fashionable in the 1990s, I (and many others) resisted; why would/should we want to be reachable all the time? I finally gave in late 1998, but for a very practical reason.
At the time I was in the Netherlands army and the unit I was assigned to had ceremonial duties related to the royal family. One of our princes was sick and might even die and so we were on constant standby in case our salute battery would have to formally announce his passing. This meant that we were allowed our weekend leave, but only on the condition we could be reached at all time and make it back to the barracks within an hour. As I didn’t want to spend my weekends sitting next to a phone, I decided to buy my first mobile; and as you all know, once you’ve got one there’s no way back.
So since 1998 I’ve had a mobile, but I never used it much. I’ve got a bit of a phobia when it comes to calling people and so I would really only use it to occasionally text my friends short messages like: “Beer coffee shop, 17:30?” Then I got my first smartphone in 2013 (yes, I know I’m a late adopter) and things moved to a whole new level. I didn’t think much of smartphones at first, but now I can’t quite imagine life without it. I use my phone (currently a Xiaomi Redmi-9 in case you’re wondering) for everything. It’s my camera, mp3-player, note-taking device, archive, memory and my connection to the outside world. I use it for my emails, to talk to my parent on the other side of the world and I even do all my banking via the phone these days. The one thing I don’t really use my phone for is to call people! This, I think, is crucial, once the phone stopped being a phone, our dependence on it has grown.
These days, we use our phones continuously, to take a quick snapshot (of food, ourselves or each other), to look something up online, to translate unfamiliar menu items, to check currency conversions, the list goes on and on. Is this a bad thing? Probably not, but should we be overcome by existential dread if we find ourselves without our phone? Definitely not! Yet maybe we should pay a little less attention to the tiny screen when we are with other people.
[T]here you are.
