Opinion

Anita Robinson: Cocooned in a blank-faced, earphoned world of mobile technology

We technophobes are coming to a slow boil
We technophobes are coming to a slow boil We technophobes are coming to a slow boil

MY elderly Nokia mobile is in the geriatric ward of the phone hospital and I don't expect it to `do'.

Having survived more than a decade of mishaps, including brief accidental submersion in two toilets, it sustained life-threatening injuries last week by being dropped on a tiled floor.

Back home, my local phone medic examined it with that brow-puckering, teeth-sucking expression that prepares the recipient for bad news and said he'd do his best.

The disaster occurred while I was travelling in England and though I was briefly bereft and panic-stricken, carrying the poor mangled thing around with me hoping it might miraculously revive, in truth I felt only mildly inconvenienced.

Unlike many whose phones are permanently welded to hand and ear, I'm not addicted to exchanging time-wasting trivialities with half of humanity.

Temporarily incommunicado myself, I became acutely aware of how wired-up everyone else was. Walking strange streets, taking the Underground or mainline trains, passengers, pedestrians, cyclists, scooterists and bikers are cocooned in their own blank-faced, earphoned world.

The ears-free café coffee-swiggers are ceaselessly tapping, scrolling or swiping. A fellow ahead of me in a newsagents conducted his entire purchase and card-payment of seven items without making eye-contact with the shopkeeper or pausing in his dictation of a report to his office and left without a word of acknowledgment or thanks. It did my head in.

And while we're on the subject of courtesy, or lack of it, we technophobes are coming to a slow boil about people who put their phone on the dining table and when it rings ask, "D'you mind if I take this?" without waiting for (or expecting) a reply. One of these days I'll have the courage to say, "Yes, I DO mind actually," as conversation dies among the company.

I was ecstatic at the age of 16 when my parents finally had a landline installed. I envisaged myself like American teen icon Sandra Dee, spending happy hours talking to friends (and, hopefully, boys) on the ultra-modern splay-legged telephone `banquette' bought to accommodate the instrument.

Alas, it was made clear to me its use was for emergencies only, in case any of our ageing family connections in Co Down became seriously ill or died. Any conversation exceeding three minutes brought my father into the draughty front hall waving the Irish News with a face on him. My mother answered calls apprehensively in a tight high voice quite unlike her own.

I didn't own a mobile phone until the mid-nineties when I was in a peripatetic teaching job covering counties Derry, Tyrone and Fermanagh with a genius for getting lost on the way to little rural schools. The Loving Spouse and I spent many weekends finding them in advance, but it wasn't any guarantee I'd get there on my own.

What I resent about the mobile phone is that you can always be found and presumed always available - still, better out of the world than out of fashion.

People of my vintage remember with joy a degree of childhood and adolescent freedom no young person knows today. Yes, the world was maybe safer then, children more biddable and parents less alarmist.

Now, our kids are fiercely protected from germs, traffic and physical dangers, but we put into their immature hands the means to access, unfiltered, at the touch of a keypad, all the meretricious values and sordid perversions of an amoral world to corrupt their innocence. Mobile phones are a scourge in schools.

It's the nature of pupils to subvert authority, whatever attempt it makes to better them. In our laughably naïve era, we passed snide little notes, read a disapproved-of teen magazine inside an atlas or developed hacking coughs to disguise the crunch of illicit potato crisps. Now it's vile texts, taunts, threats and cyber-bullying, resulting in an alarming rise in teen mental breakdown and self-harm.

In our newfound mania for `being connected', we've never been more emotionally disconnected.

Meantime, I'm not sick, not dead - just switched off for a bit of peace.