Killer Phone!

 A lot of people have publicly decried our abundant usage of technology. They claim that our love of I-Phones is killing our attention spans and disconnecting us from reality causing us to miss out on the adventure of life. Well I think those wimps have all missed the boat! I would like to claim that the rise of gun violence, sex crimes, and rampant divorces in America is a result of your spending time on your smart phone. Yeah, you heard me right, your Android is killing people and ruining homes. Let’s examine why.

The New IPhone 7

 It’s clear that the culture we grow up in affects our behavior, and in many cases, the way we treat each other. This is something that became far clearer to me after I got married. I grew up in the USA, raised on the comedy of the Marx Brothers, Jacky Gleason, and Al Bundy. My wife, on the other hand, grew up in Canada in a cultural climate very different than ours where comedy was much gentler. Shortly into our marriage I noticed that my wife used to get upset with me when I would make certain types of jokes and tell me that I was being mean. But I wasn’t being mean I was being funny!

 Of course, on reflection, we realize that the style of comedy many of us grew up on in America is based on laughing at the expense of others. It is mean but we’ve grown so used to it that for us it is okay to be cruel as long as one is “just teasing”.

 Another wakeup call I think we’re all more familiar with came from my parents. Again, having absorbed every lesson from the American sitcom culture, I began to understand that being a smart alec kid was cute, funny, and desirable. I learned the hard way that my parents and teachers only thought so when it was relegated to paid actors. Whoops!

 So what is the cell phone culture? How do our smart phones affect our interactions with other people?

 It seems to me as though every contemporary communication or relationship self-help book seems to be based on the concept that we simply don’t know how to talk to each other.

 I asked myself if this was always the case or if this is some new genre of books coming to fill a recent void. If so, who created that void and how?

 A new facet of our everyday life is that more and more we spend so much of our time interacting with machines and not with people. Once upon a time, we all spent a lot of face to face time with each other because DynoBlaster had not yet been invented. But, says you, what if I use my machine to interact with people, and yes, says I, I know, but I think that that actually makes things worse.

Hey, Bobo. 'Sup?

 In order to appreciate the idea a little deeper, I’ll invoke a concept made famous by Martin Buber that one should work toward appreciating other people not as an It but as a Thou, and thereby, “each becomes aware of the other and is thus related to him such a way that he does not regard and use him as his object, but as his partner in a living event.” Put simply, every human being is made up of two components, an object, like every other object in the physical Universe, but his uniqueness is his consciousness, the fact that he is feeling and thinking, and therefore as far away as object as one can be.

 When we relate to people in this way, we sense and feel a deeper love and appreciation for them since we realize that they, like us, are at the center of a universe of experience. Once we become aware of that we interact with people in a whole new way. For example, when we are in the middle of a fight with someone, we tend to view them as an oppositionary force bent on our frustration, but when we are able to see that, like us, they our experiential beings who came to this point through their life experiences we stop fighting and start understanding (hopefully).

 So how do smart phones affect this process? I’d love to hear what you think and I’ll post my answer next week!