Twice in the past week, I have been mistaken for some kind of deviant or eccentric because I was reading a newspaper. In both cases, I was sitting quietly in a public waiting room. In the first, a man walked across the room and politely inquired whether I was checking the financial markets, because why else would I read a newspaper? In fact, I was trying and failing to do the crossword. In the second case, a medical technician simply pointed at my paper and laughed, saying that he hadn’t seen one of those in ages.
Everyone used to read newspapers or books, but now it seems that nobody does – or at least not in public places. The world is focused on its phones. Since smartphones put the Internet in everyone’s pocket – and what a stroke of marketing genius that was - these pricey gadgets seem to have acquired magnetic power. Owners can’t look away from them, check them constantly day and night, and suffer breakdowns if their phone is lost or stolen. The sight of someone walking, jogging, pushing a stroller, or even driving, with a phone in front of their face has become commonplace. This almost never happened with newspapers. The Japanese have even given phone addicts a name: “The Heads down crowd.”
I assumed that the habit would just fade away like the craze for carrying water bottles. It was reasonable to suppose that the casualty statistics from phone users walking into lamp posts or trees, falling down open manholes, or wandering obliviously into traffic would soon be enough to persuade the survivors to lift their heads and pay attention to their surroundings. But it hasn’t worked, or at least not yet.
What worries me a little, apart from the potential for accidents, is that my waiting room companions may be suffering from an information deficit. I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that a two-inch by four-inch screen with dancing teenagers cannot have quite the same factual content as a full-size broadsheet newspaper with twenty pages carrying news from around the world. But I may have got the whole thing backwards, and the little screens are precisely an escape from all that. Nobody wants to sit in a waiting room being terrified by the real news, so even dancing teenagers are a relief.
The original cell phone or flip phone was a harmless, useful gadget, handy in emergencies away from home. The so-called smartphone is an emergency in itself, absorbing the attention of millions of intelligent adults, and more importantly, millions of not-so-intelligent children who are exposed, at a very early age, to the full range of human weaknesses and depravities. These are things it is better to learn about gradually, arriving at full comprehension at the age of sixty, when it’s too late to do anything about it.
I look at my old, wired phone with affection and some anxiety. It sits beside me, quietly, not flashing or beeping, and I know that if I pick it up, it will work as a phone and not assault me with advertising, propaganda, and apps, whatever they are. This is a huge conspiracy, make no mistake about it. Any day now, I expect the storm troopers of Silicon Valley high command to come and snatch away my historic but reliable wired phone, and my daily newspaper, leaving nothing but unreliable connections, incomprehensible apps, unverifiable news, and those inexhaustible dancing teenagers.
