Keep your phone in your pocket

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/08/2024 (453 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The bus is heading north.

As is not an unusual occurrence, someone waiting at the bus stop leaps up from a bench at the moment the bus cruises by. A moment too late.

Distracted by their smartphone, they hadn’t seen the bus coming. Luckily, the driver, used to such distractions, had slowed to be absolutely sure the potential passenger wasn’t waiting for this bus.

Inside, almost everyone has a phone out. Two passengers also almost miss their stops, engrossed.

Later on the same day, heading south this time, a gaggle of teens boards the bus, talking and laughing excitedly. Overloud, still learning modulation. Just being teens. One pulls out their cellphone to look at it. Then another. Then everyone. Pavlov’s bell has been rung.

For the rest of their journey, Mountain to Portage, an expedition crossing two streets and 26 avenues, there is unexpected teen silence, each of the five studying their own phone.

Yesterday, we had a Think Tank piece from Dennis Hiebert, writing about people giving up smartphones and going back to their “dumber” flip-phone precursors, as if they were donning a kind of technological chastity belt to prevent them from succumbing to their baser urges to watch the latest cat video.

Understandable, when smartphone users are spending — it’s fair to say wasting — an average of five hours a day on their devices.

Smartphones are an absolutely amazing piece of hand-held technology. From flashlight to birdsong and plant identifier, from fitness tracker to GPS, from communications device to concentration-destroyer, they are reshaping our world in ways most could not have conceived when IBM began selling the Simon Personal Communicator in 1994.

But at what cost?

Go to a bar or a concert to see a live band perform, and you can marvel at the sheer number of people who believe recording an experience is more important than, well, experiencing it. You can only guess how many near-identical videos of the same event are filling up terabyte upon terabyte of storage space.

Go to a restaurant and you can look across at a table for two, complete with a couple entranced not with each other, but with the blue glow of their hand-held devices.

Watch a parent with a two-year-old in a stroller, the two-year-old burbling happily at the jolts and judders of a Winnipeg sidewalk soiree, while the parent is ear-podded to somewhere else entirely.

We’re humans: we evolve — mental and eventually, physically too — around our tools, and we will no doubt evolve to reach a point of balance with this latest seismic shift in technology.

But, in the process, we will lose a lot of a crucial resource that we all have a finite amount of — time.

And we’ll miss plenty of first-hand experiences that we will never, ever recover.

Today is the first day of August; it is the height of summer, the days are hot, the evenings soft. There might be thunder and lightning, birds calling in the shadows, maybe just the chance to sit and feel the warmth of all-too-brief summer sun on your skin. Walk a woods path — marvel at flowers.

Maybe we should all resolve to spend more time being where we are, rather than using our finite number of days being entranced by the fey shadows in a technological box that seems to own us more than we own it.

Fight the good fight. Resist.

Live in the experience, rather than in a small and blue-screened reflection of it.

And don’t take out your phone. Just don’t. Please don’t. Because if you do, we’ll probably find ourselves doing the exact same thing.