I love having dinner with friends. Good conversation, sharing good times and bad, laughing, and sometimes even a tear or two. However, there is also one regret about such evenings. I don't know what I ate! We may have labored over the stove to prepare dinner, or paid good money at a restaurant, but so absorbing is the conversation that it just doesn't get much attention. Friends are first, and the remainder somehow goes by unnoticed. This is also the feeling I have as I watch my students after class -- busily texting away or talking on their cell phones. It's almost as if they take time off from networking to attend the class. Friends first and continuously. James Katz and Mark Aakhus appropriately entitled their edited volume on the cell phone, Perpetual Contact. As documented in their work, we are increasingly captivated by communication with a close network of others -- usually friends, possibly our family, or a lover. People we care about and who care about us. The invitation to connect is always there at our fingertips, and it is so easy.
But I am also concerned about this new indulgence. What is happening to the focus of our attention, and the effects on cultural life? The perpetual conversation is like an extended dinner party without food. The metaphor of the bubble is useful here. As we are drawn into conversation it's as if we enter a bubble. A thin film separates us from the world outside. We are so absorbed by activity in bubbleland that what is outside ceases to mean very much. It begins to become invisible. There are the more obvious cases, the auto accidents -- many of them tragic -- caused by driver's absorption in cell phone connection. And of course there is the tale of the girl who fell down a man-hole while gabbing away on her cell phone. There are also the more subtle effects, such as the failure to notice the beauty of the day, the sites, sounds, and smells that make up our creaturely pleasures.
However, perhaps my greatest concern here is with the ways in which we cut ourselves away from others about us. As my students phone and text away after class, they fail to speak with each other. They scarcely notice their classmates. The possibility for a "local community" is diminished. As adolescents are increasingly drawn into the bubble world of friends, their relations with family members are eroded. Indeed, in the adolescent case it may often turn into a war between us and them -- "my friends and I" against "my interfering and controlling parents." But the effects are even greater. So absorbed are many students by life in the bubble that their studies lose interest; like their parents, their assignments become interfering and controlling. As a colleague of mine recently remarked, many of his students bring their laptops to class and appear to be taking notes. Actually many of them are on Facebook, AIM, Twitter, or email. They contribute nothing more to class than a corpse, and they take away almost nothing. Future possibilities are thrown away. Nor in the bubble world do we have to think about the wars in which we are engaged, health care, unemployment and the like. It's mostly petty, albeit comforting chatter.
And the world turns without us.
In my view, the vast share of time we spend in the cell-phone bubble is unnecessary, and we do mutual harm to each other and to society as we interrupt our lives to have a quick word or a text message. To be sure, sometimes we may need to connect; important issues are at stake or last minute adjustments must be made. At other times, however, we may simply connect out of boredom, to fill time, or to fulfill an obligation. At times we may even imagine others are hoping or expecting to hear from us; we simply feel a few little words will bring them an added ounce of pleasure. These are little pleasures to be sure. But with a few agreements among us, we could easily change the patterns. This small sacrifice might enable us to walk through the neighborhood, chat with our neighbors, enjoy the feeling of our bodies in the sun, appreciate more fully the flavors of our food, ask ourselves what we might do to help our environment or community, or think about how we engage in political action. In my opinion this is a sacrifice worth making. And too, it is one less thing we have to do.
