The callous smartphone

There can be no denying that technology has not always changed people’s lives for the better. The extraordinary communications benefits come at a cost. The unintended consequences of technology now surely deserve closer examination. Two years ago, social media carried a short cartoon in which a character busy taking photographs of another who was clinging to the edge of a building, walked backwards and found himself in a similar predicament. From the windows of buildings all around, people began to film his dilemma on their own smartphones. Cut to India’s Karnataka state this week, when a 17-year-old cyclist was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver. Not so many years ago, bystanders would have rushed to the young man’s assistance. But not this time. Instead something extraordinary, something quite appalling, happened. Nobody at all ran to the lad’s aid. Instead, those with smartphones snapped him as he bled to death. Doctors said afterwards that had he received immediate assistance, he would have survived. Some serious factors are highlighted by this horrific story. People tend to hold back from gruesome injuries not simply out of squeamishness but because they have no idea of what to do. Basic first aid is a skill that has been mastered by only a relatively small number of people worldwide. But not getting involved out of ignorance is one thing. Actually being a voyeur filming the death agonies of a victim is entirely another matter. War photographers justify their refusal to get out from behind their cameras and help the wounded and dying they are recording by saying that their job is to show the outside world what is happening, to demonstrate the agonizing reality of battle. But ordinary people filming the horror of a road traffic collision have no such excuse. What they are recording is unlikely to be seen by many unless heartlessly posted on social media, without regard for the feelings of the victims’ relatives. Somehow the clever lump of glass and alloy that is the smartphone has all too often produced a disconnect between its user and reality. At its most basic, the smartphone has always been antisocial. Because people can be called at any time and anywhere, they will break off to answer a phone even in the midst of a face-to-face conversation. In the early days, such behavior was seen as rude and discourteous to the people they were keeping company. But at least it was possible to maintain eye contact with them. Nowadays, communications are as likely to arrive in the form of a text message. The eyes are thus lowered to the screen as the fingers fly over the keyboard tapping out a reply. The behavioral changes that smartphone technology has brought to society surely need reexamining. Reality is being moved from where we are and whom we are with to what arrives on the screens in the palm of our hands. The smartphone seems to point up a restlessness whereby nothing is ever quite adequate, even the latest message that has been received. Normal human intercourse when people are in each other’s company is being replaced by the continual distraction of information flying in across the ether, remarkably little of which is genuinely in need of an urgent response. Unfortunately, concepts of time management, organization and even the ability to chill out and relax are flying out the window.