WhenWeAreQueen

While we’re making stuff up.

I have a film short I run in my mind every so often.  It plays, for instance, whenever someone with whom I am visiting (or a random stranger who falls within my ambit) shows a preference for bits and bytes over being polite and courteous to those actually taking the form of flesh and blood in front of them.  In my fantasy, I remove the cell phone from the user’s hand, throw it on the ground and smash it to bits with my feet.  Then I look up, smile apologetically, and say, “Oh dear.  Your phone just lost its signal.  Can you hear me now?” 

I don’t carry my phone with me most of the time.  I never take it into offices.  I don’t keep it with me in movies or at dinner.  I don’t sleep with it on.  Thus, I never have the opportunity to check my email or answer a text when I am supposed to be giving my time and attention to a real human.  I figure whatever someone not with me has to say and/or whatever event of moment occurs, I will have time for it later.  After all, homo sapiens sapiens has flourished over the course of millennia without instantaneous digital communication.  I presume I can make it a few minutes in the same fashion.  I find people who have formed an almost organic link to their phones to be not only irritating but, dare I say it, self-important.  No one is indispensable.  Although most of Washington thinks it is. 

I just began a book by Mark Helprin that covers some of this ground.  Aptly titled Digital Barbarism, he makes the argument that individual liberty is at risk from the technological strides we are making—not from their intrinsic evilness, but because we are not acting deliberately as we use our new machines.  He uses the idea of the copyright to make his argument, precisely because it embodies both the idea of information management and personal property.  That much I know from the preface and the reviews of the book.  I plan to enjoy reading it, without my cell phone anywhere near me.