Today’s Aftenposten
newspaper ran an article about the use of smart phones here in Norway. According
to the article, 57% of Norwegians over the age of 16 have a smart phone, 93% of
all Norwegians have internet access, and nearly three million Norwegians use
Facebook (TNS Gallup statistics). But the article didn’t focus on the usage
statistics; it focused on the growing addiction of smart phone owners to their phones.
One of the managers at the National Theater was interviewed, and she meant that
the addiction was becoming a problem for the theater because the users were
looking at their phones throughout performances and disturbing the people
around them because the light from the phone is so bright. I quote her
(translated from Norwegian): ‘We have had nights where so many people in the
audience have had their phones on during the performance that it could have
been New Year's Eve’. I call this the height of rudeness.
The advances
in computer and phone technology just during the past ten years have been
pretty amazing. I understand the fascination with all things new; I also understand
how important it is to keep up with the pace of modern technologies. If you don’t,
you’ll end up lost and exiled to the outskirts of modern society. I do feel
sorry sometimes for elderly people who haven’t kept up or who haven’t had the
chance to keep up—who may feel overwhelmed and confused and who wish the world
was still as it was thirty or even twenty years ago. But it’s not. I want to
keep up and I have kept up. We are fast approaching a world where most ordinary
things we do will happen online—from banking to shopping to trip reservations
as well as a myriad of other things. It is already that way to a large extent. I
don’t have a problem with any of this. I love banking online, for example. We have
two laptop computers at home, I just bought an iPad2, we bought a big flat
screen TV a few years ago, and I own a top-quality digital SLR camera that I use
quite often. I don’t own a smart phone, however, and am not sure I will buy one
now that I have the iPad.
However, as
much as I use and love all the new gadgets available, I also know when to put
them aside for the most part. I know I am not addicted to any of my gadgets,
although I can overdo it a bit at times with snapping photos. I do on occasion
use a lot of time on my laptop; especially during the evenings when I use it to
pursue my writing and photo projects. What I can’t understand is the point of being
on Facebook for hours at a time or of sending hundreds of text messages or
emails. So I can’t really relate to the addiction problem. I can go to the
movies, the opera, the theater, or out to a restaurant and leave my cell phone
at home. It has happened. I don’t miss it. I usually have it with me, but when I
am together with others, it’s off or silenced, ditto for being in a theater. I
don’t need to be constantly conversing with other people, on buses, trains,
boats or planes. I don’t walk behind other people and make them nervous by
chatting on phones they don’t see. When that happens to me I feel like I am
being followed by crazy people talking to themselves. I don’t need to check my
emails constantly, so I don’t need to be online constantly. I write this blog
but I don’t need to check it constantly either. And as time goes on, I know
that I will organize the free time I treasure even more optimally than I manage
to now. That will be because I don’t want to spend all my free time writing on
a computer or connected to some gadget, updating the world constantly about
where I am, what I am doing, or who I am together with. That is because I value
my private time and my private life. There are many things that no one else
except those closest to me will be privy to. That’s the way I want it.
I find it
sad, apropos this newspaper article, that so many people are living online
rather than experiencing the ‘now’. The now
is all we have. Think of what they’re missing. I would rather be together in
person with a friend and enjoying an evening talking and relaxing, without
having to check my phone every ten minutes. It’s rude to do that—that’s the way
I grew up. I can hear my mother’s voice in my head saying something to that
effect. I have seen enough people sitting together at a restaurant table, and
each of them was texting messages to friends or family that were not there with
them, ignoring the others at the table. More rudeness. I attend professional
meetings that are constantly interrupted by emails and phone calls. It is
difficult to pick up the thread and to go forward with the meetings after four
or five of these kinds of interruptions. I’ve been to lectures where many in
the audience are using their laptops and smart phones to check their emails
and/or to edit their own lectures or reports. It’s become a brave, new, rude, socially-unintelligent
world, despite all the gadgets that can socially connect us and which should be
used intelligently. I would always choose the personal connection over the
gadget or social media connection. I appreciate what the latter have made
possible for me, the ex-pat who lives across the pond from her country of
birth, in terms of keeping in touch with family and friends, but give me the
in-person experience of being together with them any day.
