By Adam Wakefield
One Sunday I was with a group friends at a bar, when my friend approached me to use my phone since his battery had died. I naturally agreed, and promptly took out my SIM card so he could use his. While my friend was busy away with my phone, a distraction in conversation led to the SIM card falling between the floorboards, lost to eternity and a blaze of incompetence. Upon realising my error, a wave of great anguish swept over me, a feeling I’m sure anyone has felt when failing at the most basic hand motor control.
The night wound to a dramatic climax, and upon waking up I realised that suddenly, I wasn’t connected … out the telephonic loop and unable to check my email or Facebook with there being no Internet at home. Phones have advanced a great deal have they not?
Initially, a great sense of abandonment filled my thoughts, since surely now was the time a vital call, SMS, or online message will be sent and I just won’t be able to get involved. I was cut off from the outside world, with my only saviour being an online chat available from the email account I use, at work, which barely cuts it as a tool of communication when faced with problems of what to do over the weekend. Coordination is everything.
The question I asked myself was why I, just as an example, feel this way just because I can’t be contacted or contact people for a couple of days when on the move?
The answer lies perhaps in the notion that society has become increasingly dependent, and therefore inadvertently hapless, at dealing with life without a BlackBerry (the new fad from the north), Internet or a cellphone. With communication technology having advanced tremendously and one could say quite startlingly over the last 10 years even, the dependence of people on technology is becoming ever more apparent.
South Park, that great diocesan of pop culture satire, has an episode where the internet stops working, an outlandish concept but an incredibly interesting scenario. In the episode, society crumbles as life grinds to a halt, people freak out at not being able to email each other, and men all over the planet are disappointed that they can’t get their daily dose of online porn. People in their thousands go on a Great Digital Trek to Silicon Valley, to “Caleforney Way”, where there is rumoured to be some internet. People have to turn to normal post, and hark, the telephone, cobwebs and all, to communicate. Amusing, but strangely accurate in a weird sort of way.
While South Park pretty much takes the piss out of everything, and everyone for that matter, the message it was sending is loud and clear: have people lost the ability to interact with each other without the added incentive of there being an online fallback plan?
Even the way people write has changed due to the increased influence of communication technology. First we had to deal with the abbreviation of the English language for SMSs or texts. That was horrible enough, but now with SEO (search engine optimisation) becoming an ever-increasing part of business on the web, certain language will always be favoured just because there is a higher chance that Average Andrew will type it in to their Google bar. I’ve even heard some colleagues “lol” at each other after a joke since they are too lazy to go for a “haha” or actually laugh. Language, it would appear, is becoming increasingly abbreviated, de-valuing it of meaning and sustenance for a discerning mind to pick apart.
The upside of being un-contactable as it were was that I wasn’t bothered by the incessant wants of people I didn’t feel like dealing with. The mobile telephone has almost in this sense become a curse, invading the public’s sense of privacy, making people contactable 24/7 which surely isn’t healthy? There is the view from certain cultures that when you are photographed, a piece of your soul is stolen by the camera, one little flash at a time. The same could be said for phones. I never understood the need for a person to have two separate phones, with one being private and the other for business. Now, after entering the working world, sometimes people just do not want to be contacted for business reasons. Work sucks, which makes the practice even more sensible.
There is no greater communication than a face-to-face conversation because when you are in the presence of a person it is possible to read more from a person than just the words they use. Body language, the “vibe”, whatever term you want to use, is often a far more effective means of communication then sending an SMS. That is way too abbreviated to say anything meaningful, unless accompanied by a previous personal history, say between friends. As much as people believe heir Facebook/Twitter worlds are on par with the real one (World of Warcraft players know this feeling well I assume), where they believe joining a protest group singling out some cause or person will actually make a difference (it doesn’t mean jack), sometimes the only thing that can do and should do, is the real, the see-able, the physical.
Did I feel naked being disconnected? You bet, but as Darryl Kerrigan says in the Australian film The Castle while admiring his ramshackle of a home, “how’s the serenity?” We could all use a little bit more of that.
Adam Wakefield is a journalist working in Cape Town
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