This video was doing the rounds among my circle of Facebook friends last week. If you can't be bothered hitting the link, it's a series of staged scenarios where important life events are 'ruined' because those involved are using their iPhones in some way. Taking a selfie after a marriage proposal, reading something at the dinner table, that sort of thing.
It's a disingenuous piece of work, this video, like pretending trashy reality programs are the only things shown on television. Before I go on, I should add that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the thrust of the argument. As a travel writer, I'm often conscious of photographing various experiences rather than experiencing them. The technology (in this case a DSLR camera) means you are one level removed from reality. But what the video above intentionally fails to show is how technology can enhance an experience.
Smartphones are often painted as conversation killers, but they can also be conversation enhancers - handheld access to the internet can help settle disagreements or expand a discussion. Smartphones are also portable slideshows; they provide visual accompaniments to stories or can be conversation starters in themselves.
The idea that smartphones are somehow more insidious than any technology that preceded them is nonsense. The problem is that humanity as a whole has a kind of amnesia. The study of history should in theory be the cure for it, but it has proven sadly ineffective - especially the post-modernist version, which does not believe in facts or events, only interpretations of them. Nowhere is this collective amnesia more evident than in the phobia that accompanies every new technological development.
Before iPhones, video games were the great evil that would push society towards inevitable decay. (From time to time, some ingnorant individuals still try to wheel out this rusty old barrow.) Prior to video games, television was going to rot society's best minds. In the pre-television years, radio programs (yes, really) made folks sit around a box in silence instead of speaking to each other. Before radio, workers smashed machines because they felt they were being replaced. And I'm sure every invention right back to the wheel and fire had its naysayers.
What we find at the core of all this is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what is new. These fears are the writer's bread and butter. The notion that things are going wrong, that our nice little equilibrium is about to be upset, is the very essence of drama and conflict. Whether we're talking romance, crime, science fiction or horror, a story begins when the norm is turned on its head. The role of fiction in general (and good movies and TV shows for that matter) is to give a concrete form to these fears and to show that humanity can survive change. It's a catharsis.
This is why, I believe, the printed word must never be allowed to shrivel and die. It has a permanence every other medium lacks. Books are society's collective memory, a reminder that the problems we face now are not new, but the same old problems arising again in different forms. This is comforting. Sure, societies crumble, but other societies - sometime better ones - grow in their place.
Anyway, I'm about to go and link to this post on Facebook... a technology that I saw referred to on TV the other morning as a "bad habit".