Only a few weeks' ago, (no, I don't feel any pressure to feverishly update the blog to keep up with this digital world) I had dinner with my dear Franco-Mexican friend and two gringas. Technically speaking, they were not both gringas, but both live in Houston and work at the same venture capital firm; one was of Mexican parents and upbringing but had an appropriately nasal prissy American girl's accent, and the other was a true Texan with the Texan lilt sneaking out at certain words like: "Y'all."
To be precise, I had dinner with my Franco-Mexican friend, two American girls and their blackberrys. A mere lull in conversation sufficed for them to look back at their carefully positioned blackberries (is the plural same as the fruit? I wonder) and tap away to inform those in Texas and beyond. Though I have compassion for people who are slavishly bound to their work via their phones or blackberries, I can't imagine anything could be so pressing. Apparently, the Texan was fixing a mistake that a secretary had made in her absence and the other I think just wanted to seem as if she had something better to do. Who isn't free of being only a text message away at any moment?
On her birthday, my mother and I took out my Franco-Mexican friend for dinner, and my friend spent a great deal of time on her blackberry. I didn't mention it then (I waited a week or two) because perhaps she just wanted to answer the sundry birthday wishes she'd received, but she may also just have been bored, which is possible for some as anxious as she is, the moment she is not involved in a conversation.
So there are the constraints of work (fostered by the idea, or fear, that whenever one leaves, it all goes to pot and the boss blames you) and the anxiety of modern life, but aren't we cultivating these anxieties? Aren't we buying the latest versions of these devices only to exacerbate them? Are we not somehow directly investing in a kind of mass autism?
There are social networks that orchestrate virtual lives that fill voids within people and give them a sense of importance, but that is not the issue. The issue is that those virtual lives take more importance or attention than the living, breathing people around you.
The other flagrant moment of distraction, which I witnessed and which made me incensed, is during class. I feel as if I'm selling all my classmates down the river, as it were, but yesterday I also became guilty of the same. I haven't been in school for seven years until this fall, and, during that time, there has been the birth and expansion of Facebook and proliferation of smartphones. Nearly everyone in my class of 21 students has a smartphone and if they don't, it doesn't bother them (who are on average 24 to my stately 29) to text back and forth throughout lectures.
Yesterday, I was caught in the web of distraction as I was beleaguered by phone messages and emails from my mother, her travel agent, and my brother, ever the diplomat, who thought I was actively avoiding them all. It occurred to none of them that I was in class, and yet, I thought, would that have stopped them?
I felt guilty yet compelled to answer and, as Providence would have it, the bleeding iPhone's battery bled to death five minutes before class finished-- thankfully. One of my pet peeves is the incessant talking (is it a French habit?) during visiting lecturers but the incessant twittering, texting and emailing is less audible but far worse.
To be fair to autistes, they are generally particularly gifted at paying attention and often have excellent memories, so the term isn't synonymous with our current behavior. (Gringa isn't a correct term for American girls either, and yet it is precise. Read the Economist article on the issue of what to call the people from what Caetano Veloso called "the country without a name.") Furthermore, studies show that people with linguistic or behavioral difficulties generally have the root of their inability in their genetic code.
We don't have that luxury. We cannot blame a faulty genetic code on the fact that we're better at creating virtual lives and building real ones. Or, that we depend more on machines than our own minds. Blackberry now offers an application called "Where's my car?" for those afflicted with memory loss specific to being unable to find your car in a vast car park.
People have come to terms with their dependence but they don't seem capable or any case willing to do anything about it. The website Crackberry, which boasts over 2.7 million members, seemed to be the #1 forum for addicted blackberry users. Silly me thought it meant to deal with their addiction but it's really meant to find out about new applications and ask questions like, "Why does blackberry take so long to boot?"
As an owner of an iPhone who will promptly publish the link to this article on her Facebook page, I am no Luddite, but what astounds me is the question of how we will raise a new generation that will not have social ineptitude born of exceptional technological aptitude? The overall effects are not visible, but we need only observe what it has already done to us.
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