Technology and I: The end of an affair?
It’s 3:58pm on a Saturday afternoon and the airplane icon is flying west in the right corner of my iPhone. A flight. An escape. A journey. I have fled. And it feels amazing. The day is still brimming with possibilities, rich with promise; the hours extending over one another like the pages of a folded children’s picturebook.
The first phone I ever got was in third grade; a Motorola C115. I wore it on my neck with a strap and used only to call my mother during lunch if the bullies were getting restless. Two years later I upgraded to a flip phone. Then an LG slide. Then a Galaxy. Then there was my computer, absorbing half of my desk with its clunky mouse, forever chasing the keyboard. But that was okay. Because my computer had Skype.
Skype was the highlight of my days. What, to me, then seemed like the equivalent of steamy night clubs with sticky floors and handsome strangers: excitement on ecstasy. My avatar made no sense whatsoever and my status was a cringeworthy attempt to intrigue the boys and confuse the girls. I chatted and chatted and chatted, I (wink)ed and (hug)ed and (xd)ed. I was the queen of “brb” and the “bb” – a clear finish line between your virtual affair and real life that still existed back then. The chatroom echoed all that was so sweet, tempting and sadly- forbidden in the transient age of thirteen.
But then came 2007 the 9th of January 2007 when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. Fast-forward, 13 years and now 3.5 billion people own a smartphone worldwide. More than nine-in-ten millennials own smartphones and 45% of these are iPhones. The apple is a barcode stamped on a civilisation starved of meaning, the gleaming screens – extensions of our hands, flickering like a sea of lighters at a concert, paying a tribute to our dependence. RIP to our freedom, low-cortisol levels and mindfulness. We are all hyper connected, hyper informed and hyper anxious.
The apps try hard to promise otherwise. As if, you, yourself are a version of a software which can be optimised, they promise to update you. A new version with less bugs and more quick fixes! They will track your “to do” lists and teach you meditation, count your calories and nudge your steps. They will help you swipe right and left until you fall in love, they will capture every treasured moment with 12MP wide-angle camera, they will allow you to peek into the acai bowls of your besties and hold the vision boards known only to the deepest, wettest corners of your heart. And we, desperate for connection, hungry for love, know no better than to buy into the promise of instant happiness, to fight hard to find it through the very means, which destroy it.
Countless nights, unable to fall asleep, invested in a conversation that does not exist beyond the virtual world, that is not palpable, that swims up and down the curve of disappointment and neurotic need, I have found myself enraged. What am I so angry at? I have wondered. And on Saturday afternoon like today, slowly but surely it occurs to me: I am angry because for so long, I have allowed my phone to trespass my boundaries. I have offered my time and thoughts to be diced up, interrupted, and controlled by anyone and everyone. A gratuitous goodie bag at the festival that is online presence. Constantly available, constantly checking, constantly waiting. On average, people check their phones 47 times per day, that is 17,155 times a year. Perhaps it isn’t our fault that we have become addicted through the exploitation of our vulnerabilities, weaknesses and needs. But the choice to free ourselves is ours. And as much as I’d like to live in the Regency era, wear white gowns with small floral printed cottons, read heavy tomes in-between my walks with Mr.Darcy and communicate only through beige-paper letters written with quill pens, I can’t. What I can do though, is take back control of my time and my days, and leave the airplane icon at the top right corner of my iPhone screen for as long as possible, perhaps, forever.
