Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I used to brag about not having a cell phone. I’d crow about being the last person in the world to get one. I didn’t need one. Why would I want one?

Then I got one.

Next came the brags about my trusty little “me-too”. It could survive falls! I dropped it in the shower (don’t ask) and it spent a whole night sitting in water! All I needed my little phone to do was make calls, maybe send texts, I’d declare. Why would I need my phone to take a picture?

Then I got a smartphone.

By the time I finally got a BlackBerry, RIM enjoyed their highest market penetration in the Caribbean.  In Trinidad, with both mobile carriers introducing smartphones into the market around the same time, the price wars – more like sale wars – meant that anyone with opposable thumbs and a serious love of being instantly connected soon had a black boxy thing fused to their ears or hands. No matter where you looked, no matter what social class or economic group, everyone, it seemed, sported a BlackBerry. The BlackBerry became a great social leveller, and I was its most enthusiastic convert.

The truth is, unless it’s you doing it, the clickety-click of someone tapping away on their Blackberry is the most irritating sound in the world.

The Great Isolator

I confess. I have found myself BBM-ing to the point of developing Blackberry thumb, where my poor digits twitched involuntarily for almost an hour. I troll Facebook and check email when class gets boring. The moment my stimulus-addicted brain detects it’s not being fed information, I quickly pull up Times’ mobile website to get my fix.

Two months ago, my friends and I were on the way home from class. At a traffic light, an eerie silence descended over the car. The only sound, Katy Perry declaring her love for extra-terrestrials. Suddenly, all of our phones chimed. Each of us had drifted off into the world of instant messaging.

I wondered. Why is it that four intelligent, vibrant young people could not entertain ourselves by talking to each other?

Some people look at the rising dominance of the internet, social networks and smartphones and shudder uneasily. Others welcome it with open arms and happily put their lives on public display. I’m with the first group. As we sat in that silent car, click-clicking away, I couldn’t help but wonder at our generation’s new ways of communicating. Our ancestors bemoaned the lost art of communication when telephones replaced letter writing, and later declared that the internet destroyed conversation. But instant messaging, social media, and smartphones as the delivery mechanism for these new addictions have insidiously eroded our ability to even talk to each other.

No More Mr. Small Talk

Compulsive Facebook-ing and BBM-ing result in nothing to talk about in face to face conversations. We know more about our acquaintances’ lives than at any other time in history and yet simultaneously we are more removed from each other and from meaningful dialogue. There is nothing left to say; all you’ll ever need to know about someone you can find out from their Twitter page and Facebook status. We can’t even suffer through painful small talk people anymore. We know what the weather’s like because there’s an app for that. We’re caught up on news because we looked it up online. We know where we’re liming tonight because somebody pinged us. We even know when your life has turned into a country song because you begin bemoaning the state of your love life across all the social media platforms you can find. We have conditioned ourselves so well to having Facebook be our voice, the only effective way to rebel against our modern society is to declare that you’re “not a status guy”.

It’s a small comfort that history is cyclical in nature, and with another turn of the wheel, we will find another way to communicate with each other. But where does that leave us now? Distracted, hunched-over millennial Neanderthals who are left with only grunts and hoots for vocabulary? Pasty, squinty individuals with overdeveloped thumbs?

I, for one, reject that image. I say, read more books. Leave your phone at home and go to the beach. Look people in the eye and have a talk. Pick up the phone instead of texting.

I’ve even said something to that effect as my latest BBM personal message.

Photo credits:

amersol.ed.pe

theartkey.com

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