Last Saturday, Jessie and I went to the movies (for the first time in over 2 years) to see The Wolfman. In the row in front of us were a couple of teenagers obviously on a date. They walked into the theater holding hands, but as soon as they sat down in their seats, their cell phones came out. Twenty minutes they sat there before the movie started browsing the internet, texting, and whatever else and that whole time they didn’t say a single word to each other. Not a word. All the while, Jessie and I (the old timers in our late twenties) were sitting behind them chatting and giggling.
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I was watching the show “Hoarders” on A&E. The family of one such lady were gathered with a therapist discussing how her hoarding has effected them. They had wrapped up the session but were still chatting when the son completely disconnected from the circle and became engrossed in his phone. I don’t know if he was texting or checking email or what, but there was something horribly insensitive about it. He wasn’t a kid, either. He was a grown man who owned his own business.
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How many times have I been in a restaurant or at the grocery store or walking down the street or driving or anything else and have seen people completely lost in the screen of their cell phones? Too many to count. We are currently having a problem with getting people to stop texting while driving. People are engrossed in the virtual world when walking down the street and aren’t watching their surroundings. People are having one-on-one dinners and instead of connecting to the person across from them, they are on their phone. Is Twitter really that important?
I’m not going to try to say that our online lives are the make-believe part and the physical part of life is the only real part. I have quite an active online social life. It’s more social than my physical life. The people that I know online are real people to me. Real friends. But I have no problem with playing catch up on messages and coming to the conversation a little late. I don’t feel the need to be current and chat live at all hours of the day.
I know I’m sounding all preachy and holier than thou and I really don’t mean it like that. I’m not trying to say that I’m better than anybody. I think that people need to use their heads though. If I were spending time with someone and they were completely lost in their phone the whole time, I would be hesitant and want to spend time with them again. There’s something rude and disconnected about it. If I’m with you, I want to talk to you. I want to interact with you. I don’t want to have half-conversation with someone because signing offline is just too much to ask.
I don’t mind checking on a text really fast and then returning back to the physical present. If we’re just hanging out and watching TV or something and email needs to be checked really fast that’s cool, but it never happens that way, does it? You check your email really fast and see that someone left a comment on whatever social media site and you need to check it out. You go to the site and see that the reply is funny and you need to respond. While you’re there, you see that a friend did a funny status update and you need to comment on it. Then another friend mentioned a movie that you love, so you have to comment. Oh what the hell, while you’re online you’d better check Twitter really quick. Once on Twitter, you see that you’ve missed about 75 tweets and need to catch up while you’re here so you don’t fall too far behind. You retweet a few items, reply to a few, click on a couple of links, and before you know it, the friend sitting next to you on the couch is asking what the hell is so important on that phone because you’ve been completely absorbed in it for at least a half hour.
Of course you didn’t mean to be online for so long. It started out as just a quick email check. But you know what? You could have stopped at any time. Those status updates aren’t going anywhere. Neither are those tweets. Unless you tweet for work, there’s no such thing as falling behind on your Twitter reading. Your friend is only going to be hanging out with you for a few hours anyhow. Why couldn’t this stuff wait?
I can understand a deep need to be connected to other people when you’re alone of lonely. But when you have company? When you have friends over? When you’re on a date? Why does the lure of Facebook and Twitter and Google outweigh the physical person in your presence at the moment wanting your attention?
If we keep this up, evolution will give us enormous muscly thumbs and a palate that is no longer capable of speech. We’ll become Homo Textians. We’ll be nothing but physical manifestations of robots. And while in a SciFi way, that sounds awesome, there’s something about a physical human connection that seems to allude some people these days. When did the cold glow of that screen become more interesting than a real person’s face?
