Over winter break, when I still had money, I was dead set on getting an iPhone. I wanted to be able to do more than just sit idly in a lecture hall or awkwardly on the bus. Long story short, I didn’t get one: I ended up buying Baltimore Ravens playoff tickets and travel fare to visit my cousin in New England. Even though we lost to the New England Patriots and I was depressed, it was still the right decision. I chose to purchase an actual experience over a phone that, despite all its cool gadgetry and ability, discourages the chance of having any actual experience.
Flash forward to yesterday. I was riding the Shuttle-UM bus when I saw a cute girl get on in front of me. So, naturally, I glanced at her boobs and then her butt (because that’s my favorite pastime and I’m really good at it). She had a nice butt, and as she sat down, I saw her butt hit the cushion, her eyes dart to the floor and her hand whip out an iPhone like some technology-derived bodily reflex. I looked up and within my entire peripheral vision, I noticed three girls complete with six boobs, three butts, three iPhones and zero necks. That’s when I realized something was wrong with the picture. People shouldn’t be engaging in staring contests with 3.5-inch screens – maybe books, the back of their eyelids, cats or other people, but not their cell phones.
And I know it’s not just the phone that’s the problem. It’s how we use it – the steady doses of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and StumbleUpon that we get on the go, in between the heavier doses we get in class and at home (when we use our laptops). It’s the dependence we have on the watered-down communication and interaction we get from the web that we love because it’s easy and safe and manipulative. It’s the personal relationships with actual people that have gone out the window and been replaced with cell phone surrogates.
Look around. People used to look up (and around) – not down. We used to make eye contact with each other. Sometimes we’d even smile. Now that the iPhone is a cultural staple, people walk hunched over, with their heads lowered, looking like that humanoid a couple of steps down from homo sapiens on that chart of human evolution. Because that’s what our phones have done to us – what we have done to ourselves. We have devolved. We don’t think anymore. We don’t talk anymore. We form our opinions from a constant stream of status updates, communicate through hashtags and retweets and sacrifice emotions for emoticons.
We are so plugged in that we are tuned out.
So, here’s my suggestion: Put ’em away! I don’t want to see your 3.5 inches any more than you’d want to see mine. The next time you feel the urge to tweet, text or stumble on your iPhone, pull out a book instead, open your eyes and look out the window, close them and think about a story that makes you happy, call your mom or your friend and try to make her laugh or talk to the person next to you and try to make him smile. Experience something so you can remember it, learn from it or share it later.
And, whatever you do, don’t look down.
Drew Farrell is a junior English major. He can be reached at dfarrell@terpmail.umd.edu.
