I’ve ridden this rant several times before on this global communications colossus. It’s well-tilled soil, to be sure, but, dammit it, the phenomenon continues to baffle me.
This AM at Hopscotch, the coffeehouse that serves as my headquarters and back office, there stood about nine people, both waiting to put in their orders and cooling their heels for their drinks to be prepared. Each and every one of them was furiously thumbing on a smartphone.
And for the jillionth time I wondered, what in the hell are they doing? Whom are they communicating with? What urgent, desperately important task are they engaged in?
I honestly don’t know because, as loyal Pencillistas are well aware, I haven’t had a smartphone since 2017, when the screen of the first one I bought a couple of years earlier cracked and I was loathe to shell out the six or seven hundred bucks or even up to a grand for a new device. I went old school and got myself a nice flip phone, one that’s been in my pocket every day since.
It serves my needs well.
The smartphone has robbed us of those precious few moments of boredom, those instances when, with nothing else to do, we can look out the window and see where the sun’s shadows fall at this time of year, when we can look at the trees and just appreciate them, when we can glance at the lawn and know whether there’s been rain recently, when we can contemplate the infinite, when we can allow our thoughts to flow, unimpeded by demand or need, allowing us to know ourselves more intimately.
How about glancing around and seeing other people’s faces? Taking note of what they’re wearing? Innocently eavesdropping on their conversations? These are all learning, bonding exercises. And, sadly, they’re things we don’t do anymore because we’re busy thumbing messages to…, well, somebody, somewhere.
A friend recently remarked that texting is weird because it’s such an old-fashioned thing. Way back in the 1790s, when the Chappe telegraph was invented in France, it was seen as the height of modern technology, the transmission of codes and letters across distances far beyond our range of hearing. Then, with the spread of electric telegraphy by the middle of the 1800s, just about the whole world could be connected by wire so that those slow, clunky codes and letters could be transmitted, one at a time, across hemispheres. Samuel Morse’s tweak of the technology was so earthshaking, so advanced it could be viewed as the equivalent of some inventor or engineer today coming up with a handheld consumer device that can spot and eliminate any and all cancers in a person’s body at the press of a button.
The electric telegraph was so out there, in the sense of it being a harbinger of the future, that it would go on to profoundly affect the dissemination of information, the increase of knowledge, the growth of commerce, the exchange of culture, and even the execution of war.
Morse, texting.
But that was nearly 200 years ago. See how Wikipedia describes electrical telegraphy: “a point-to-point text messaging system.”
That precisely describes the system those nine people in line at Hopscotch were engrossed in.
That’s another thing that puzzles me about our 2024 mania for texting: it has replaced the telephone as our primary means of communication. Just imagine this with me for a minute: suppose, when people were becoming aware of the telegraph back in the 1840s, someone said to them, “In the future, you’ll be able to speak with each other using a technology that’ll carry your voice around the world if need be. The person you’re speaking with will hear your voice as you speak and be able to respond as if the two of you were in the same room at the same time.”
Those people of the 19840s would surely have gasped, “Holy shit! That’d be amazing. That’d make our electric telegraph look like a kid’s toy.”
That, we know now, would have been the telephone.
Yet today, speaking on the telephone is considered as old school as chopping wood to heat the home.
Somehow, though, that nearly two century-old system of communication, less immediate, less advanced, is new again, advertised by smartphone carriers as if it were as ultramodern as tourist travel to other solar systems. This just doesn’t make sense to me.
Anyway, I know I’ll be buying a smartphone soon. The world demands it. For pity’s sake, I won’t even be able to use a parking meter without one. And, I hear, soon it’ll be the only way I can get on an airplane.
When I do get a smartphone again, I’ll make sure not to be wasting my life texting nonsense to somebody, somewhere, as if the well-being of human life depends on my message. It won’t. It doesn’t.