It’s not just a lack, but a negative sense, of direction-the longer I’m somewhere, the more lost I get. I’ve long suspected that I have a brain lesion where my spatial awareness should be. You might, in those moments of recognizing phone-fueled negative thoughts for what they are-the silly derangements of technologized relations-even giggle. “No, I’m dead!” you’ll want to say.) Maybe I’ll think about something else. (“Is everything OK?” they’ll immediately ask.
You realize you don’t care if Rob’s terse, Lauren’s late, Peter’s nonresponsive. When you walk around with an old-dog device that spasms pathetically and only receives half your messages (out of order), when thoughtless word pairings like “Sounds good” and “Sure thing” enter your vocabulary by T9 necessity, your expectations of others shift. When you walk around with a device that spasms pathetically and only receives half your messages, when thoughtless word pairings like “Sounds good” and “Sure thing” enter your vocabulary by T9 necessity, your expectations of others shift. As the Dalai Lama once tweeted, “It’s important that we shouldn’t be slaves to technology.” However, bound by the Kyocera’s character limit and thumbs unused to predictive text, perhaps I could rise above, self-transcend. I knew that I had no chance of becoming the Dalai Lama of SMS with an iPhone, which practically forces you to resent your friends so that it might come out looking like the only reliable thing in your life. Forget people who don’t text back (they can enjoy hell)-even prompt responders can blast my mood to utter shit if their messages aren’t phrased exactly to my liking. It’s not that I’m a frequent texter I am, much worse, a resentful one. Texting has always been my particular sickness. When people don’t text back, his eyes sparkle with the wisdom of centuries and, from deep in the belly, he giggles. Now, does the Dalai Lama get upset? Annoyed? Paranoid something’s happened? Suddenly convinced he’d be better off without this ungrateful disrespectful selfish loser of a “best” “friend” in his life anyway? Of course not.
(News reports on the matter are inconclusive what we know is His Holiness likes to tweet and has an eponymous app.) With it, he texts a friend, “r u busy this wknd?” The weekend passes, and he never hears back. Motivating me in those early days, during the brain-shock of the new-old, was a thought experiment of my simple invention: Suppose the Dalai Lama had a smartphone. Meanwhile, many of media's technophobic éminences grises, long spooked by anything that dings and therefore feeling pretty smug about the current techlash, now see fit to indulge in and promote their analog fantasies at tedious length in national publications, as if we, the hopelessly hyperconnected hoi polloi, care about cows in the countryside, silent retreats at which tears are cathartically shed, or-please, no-the original off-gridder himself and resurgent icon of the new techno-dystopian dark age, Henry David “Friends Actually Joined Me at the Pond All the Time” Thoreau. A popular Instagrammer leaves the platform, only to return a month later (welcome back!) a tech columnist claims to read exclusively print newspapers for a month, yet tweets throughout (he’s only human!) pop renunciates in hipster enclaves nationwide grayscale their phones and #deletefacebook and demetricate their Twitters, but lemme just check this text real quick in the middle of dinner. Disconnection has become the most congratulated, least convincing narrative gimmick of recent times, a widely excusable hypocrisy. For most of those eight months, I hated myself and everyone else.įrankly, I’m embarrassed to write about this semifailed experiment. For eight months this year, I used a flip phone.
0 kommentar(er)
