I don’t know if you saw this picture in the NY Times yesterday. It accompanied an article by Ezra Klein about how the internet follows the example of television in being not an X-Ray of the world but a mold we pour ourselves into.
It is worth reading.
But I can’t get beyond the picture.
Sure, it captures a perfectly ordinary truth (also covered in the article) that we pay attention to our phones, not each other and that we have surrendered real space to devices we cradle. From a “this is the world” standpoint, the picture may as well document cars on a street, show sand at the beach.
Still, even if what you see there is altogether ordinary, the picture fascinates me.
Women and men, black and white, mostly younger but at least one guy (upper left) no longer in his 20’s or 30’s.
If I have my numbers right there are 70 people in the picture and 68 devices. But it is safe to assume the person at the front (who we see only from the forehead up) knows what Instagram is and that it will not be too many years before the kid in the pram does too.
And not a conversation anywhere.
I can drum up the standard distress about what this picture captures: Our addiction and how that serves big brother/big tech/the interests of money. But Klein speaks of this more with greater insight than I ever could.
And I have argued that the universality of this addiction means a pathway to positive change exists, since all the tools to turn the wheels of control and influence are now at our disposal, though we must first put down our devices long enough to take on the very problems they distract us from and help us pretend we are addressing.
But mostly the picture makes me sad.
If you speak English every day but Spanish is your native tongue you know how the brain imprints early experiences on you. The same sensation will be true if you can recall a meal known only to the kitchen you grew up in.
Growing up before the phone means something about human behavior is imprinted on me I can not unlearn. For a nanosecond, when I see people on their phones, my brain still asks: what are those people doing? This picture reminds me of my lack of fluency with today. It smells stale rather than sweet.
Is it not incredible we can still hear in our minds how deceased parents enunciated particular words? Recall the smell of a fish stew only they made? Or are our such imprints stronger in me than most people in this picture because their time for such imprinting was done with a phone around?
Can you form essential memories and scroll at the same time? Can you reflect on the up and down of life towards pressing the nuance and delicacy of being into who you are if you never look at anything but a screen?
The romance we are meant to be having with ourselves benefits in beauty and special-ness from devotion to an art form or a discipline or a sport or a million other non-phone activities. Mostly the romance we are meant to be having with ourselves becomes rich because of relationships with others. The key to being ourselves, in other words, is other people.
But now we are all phone carriers first. All the same in that.
Phone devotion blurs the brain’s capacity for internal signature, generalizes the finest perceptions flesh is heir to, and calibrates and classifies that which should individualize. Other people are trumped and reflection becomes one-dimensional.
It is, as the picture shows, harder to form, find, and nurture what makes us lovable to ourselves and to others And that's sad.