I have a confession to make. I’m addicted to checking my email on my generic smart phone with the apple on the back. I start to hyperventilate when the little legend at the top says “No Service” and the friendly inverted cone of WiFi is not present. I’m cut off you see. The fact that most of my email seems to be from pizza companies and hotels presenting offers to spend my money with them and not from actual real people I like seems not to matter. I need to be connected. Even when we were spending a blissfully quiet time on the island of Lundy off the Devon coast a few years ago – before it wall went wrong and I contracted adult onset Chicken Pox, another story – I had to make sure I walked past the only point in the island where there is a serviceable signal several times a day, just in case. (For reference, it is easy to find – it’s somehow appropriate that the church on Lundy marks the best chance of connection to the ether.)
The reason for this confession is to admit I have to try hard to avoid doing what I increasingly see as an unfortunate trend to lock ourselves away from each other in the real world due to a fixation with the virtual one. It is not that social networking online is bad – I’m a huge fan. I just think we are not getting the balance right between human face to face interactions and posting.
Last week we caught up with the teen-romance-zombie movie “Warm Bodies”. Getting away from the Romeo and Juliet inspired plot – there is even a balcony scene – it’s an entertaining piece of fluff with a surprisingly serious undertone of forgiveness and redemption and of how important we are to each other as people. In an early scene there our protagonist male zombie shuffles around an airport in his hoodie grunting and groaning just like, well a normal teenage boy. The zombies largely ignore each other, shuffling around in their own increasingly restricted little worlds until they get hungry. Our boy reflects what it must have been like in the good old days before this particular zombie apocalypse. There is a flashback scene of only a few seconds to this idyllic lost world. In this scene, which has stuck in my head more than the rest of the movie is that the airport is filled with living, breathing human beings… and they are all totally ignoring each other, entranced instead by their phones, tablets and laptops. So nothing much has changed then.
It is a very funny moment of course but it is also chilling. If we stop interacting and caring for each other we might as well be brainless zombies. Maybe we are becoming exactly that.
We are a social species and part of that means contact with warm, living, wonderful people. As I walk around and see people – of all ages and walks of life – wander aimlessly across the pavement because they are too busy following their twitter feed, I have an urge to walk up to them and whisper “boo!” in their ear.
Thankfully British reserve has saved me from the inevitable consequences of such direct action so maybe I’ll just blog about it instead.
In the unlikely event you are reading this on your mobile device of choice, and you are outside walking along, stop please and smile at someone as you pass. Mostly they should smile back, that’s how this interaction thing works.
If we don’t get a handle on this I think it is time to initiate Plan B. I’m getting together a group of like minded individual people, grabbing a van, supplies and a generator and heading for somewhere defensible. Who’s with me?
We can even set up a Facebook page to help organise our escape.