I think that it all began with those cutesy ads for the Apple iPod - the ones with a funky-looking youth in silhouette, wearing a very obvious pair of white 'ear-bud' ear-phones. They glorified personal choice, while at the same time closing the user off from interaction with other people. Listening to music while walking or running somehow eradicates part of the humanity of the wearer - they become 'apart.' I know - I've said 'Keep going' or 'well done' to any number of competitors in running races and been completely ignored because they were in their own little world. Not least of the anti-social effects of the iPod and its ilk is the pernicious tinny noise that they leak into the ears of other people (and the insidious devaluation of the pleasures of the noises of the real world - for example the wonder of bird song - and of the ultimate non-noise: silence).
The enslavement of parts of the human race by their devices seems to be accelerating as their devices become even more addictive. The iPod became more capable through its various iterations, culminating in the iPod Touch, which is a powerful computer that sits in the palm of your hand and which, via Wifi, can access the internet and everything on it. At the same time, the iPhone (and all those other smartphones, tablets and phablets) added calls, a camera, accelerometers, GPS and other bells and whistles to make them more incredible than anything that Captain Kirk could ever have dreamed of. Now, sitting in a railway carriage, walking along the pavement or even driving, people simply cannot resist playing with their devices. On a train, it's not a safety issue. However, surgeons have reported a new spate of injuries of people with smashed-in faces - who should be looking where they are going - who have walked smack into a pole, a lamppost or scaffolding while they have their face in their device and their brains in another dimension. As for driving and being on your phone, I saw a bumper sticker in the US recently that said 'Honk if you love Jesus - Text while driving if you want to meet Him.'
Our devices have captured our minds through an evolutionary arms race between skilled designers and our twinkle-obsessed caveman brains. The designers make their games or apps as addictive as possible (often they state this explicitly in their statements to shareholders) in order to capture eyeballs, game-play time and lucrative in-app or in-game purchases. It is in their interests to make the interaction as compelling as possible (if they don't, their competitors will out-addict them and capture their players). No wonder Sugar Candy Crush is so addictive (or so they tell me). In the same way, YouTube videos give you a plethora of similar choices to click on once you've seen one video ('Like that? You'll love this!'), Amazon will make its own suggestions as to what you might like to purchase next, and sites like Buzzfeed serve up an endless array of enticing stories ('clickbait') that are fun to read but that we really don't need. If you are weak, you will be hooked by the clickbait, and reeled-in. As the mayor of London Boris Johnson recently said, "I get up early - before 5am - and I work hard. The way to find time in your week is to cut out watching random TV and don't just sit there randomly surfing the internet and looking at 10 interesting things you never knew about Rihanna's bum. Cut all that out... it's a total waste of time."
Unfortunately, it is our children who are now bearing the brunt of this assault on their willpower. It is difficult for them to resist the blandishments of the internet and of their wonderful devices, and we must help them. Unfettered access to their devices will undoubtedly make a child into an internet-addicted, ill-mannered, socially-inept, semi-zombie. Bless them, my own dear children would undoubtedly prefer to interact with their devices rather than speak to a real person - even to me. That is precisely why we have a few rules at home:
- No devices upstairs (prevents late-night surfing);
- No devices at the meal table;
- A strict device-use curfew (currently 9.30pm);
- No YouTube channel or Facebook account (or similar) until the age of 13;
- Blocks on internet yucky stuff.
As the philosopher Aldous Huxley said, "A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it."
I wonder whether we risk being enslaved - or at the least emasculated - while we were engaged in something more 'enjoyable' such as playing some high definition first-person shoot-em-up? My own children, while trying to persuade me to install DVD screens in my old car, were surprised when I opened the sunroof and, pointing upwards, told them that we already had 'sky,' and in the highest high resolution there is - real life.
