Opinion: I detest smartphones: the source of endless trouble in the classrooms of this country, they epitomise the technological marvels of Artificial Stupidity. But it’s not just that: they appear to endow their owners with a sense of contemptuous invulnerability that allows them to cross busy roads without looking left or right as their gaze is fixed upon the all-important screen and their eager thumbs flick busily across its inviting keyboard.
When an anxious or frustrated motorist honks the horn, they dare to seem offended. Public footpaths are their undisputed domain. One of their screen-obsessed number recently cannoned into my wife, looking up from her phone only to snarl, “YOU should look where you’re going!”
Such reactions are symptomatic of a sense of narcissistic entitlement nurtured by these contraptions – something equally apparent in their owners’ habit of filling public spaces with idiotic conversation. When I first saw people coming along the footpath apparently talking to themselves, I took them to be harmless lunatics, but gradually came to see that they had small earphones pinned to their heads.
Nowadays, the broadcast can be even more flagrant: just this morning, a young man strolled up and down the park behind my house conducting a loud, vapid discussion with a woman whose equally vacuous replies were also amplified for the entire neighbourhood to hear. It was his space, after all.
So compulsive has the use of these implements become that it is not uncommon to see a dozen people at a restaurant table with every one of them gabbling into a mobile. Sometimes, I suspect, they are actually just talking to one another, since this form of communication has come to seem more “real” than mere face-to-face conversation.
It would be bad enough if that were all. But the cellphone has also become a device for deliberately messing with the lives of non-users. Some of us are old enough to remember the horrors of “slide shows” when, as children, we were brought to other people’s houses and subjected to interminable displays of their most recent camping adventures.
Nowadays, half the population carries just such magic-lantern misery in their pockets and they’ll inflict it on you at the drop of any hat: “Oh, let me just show you … no, not that one. This one! But wait, there are some even better ones … How about this? Or this? Or this?” And so on, as they push the tiresome images up and down their wretched little screens, while you politely pretend to admire.
Worse still, the mobile has become an unpleasant instrument of late-capitalist enterprise. Eager patrons trying to secure entry to the theatre, concerts or other shows are likely to find themselves at the mercy of the multinational agency Ticketmaster, which increasingly monopolises the world of bookings.
When I recently bought tickets for the Auckland Writers Festival, the booking notice informed me that “your phone is your ticket”, since “when you go mobile, your tickets will not be emailed to you or available for print”.
But “going mobile” was not something I would ever wish to do, which is why my Ticketmaster account records only my landline number. So there was, in fact, no phone on which my ticket could be recorded. I then received an email receipt insisting that “this receipt cannot be used as an entry ticket”. Frustrated, I rang Ticketmaster, whose agent, with considerable reluctance, finally agreed to email me some printable tickets. This was not an experience I ever wish to repeat. There is (so far) no law compelling every citizen to own a smartphone. But do not expect ready access to entertainment without one.
There is worse to come. In China, I am led to believe, smartphones have completely replaced bank cards. It can’t be long before your bank announces “your phone is your money”. Do not expect to eat without one.
Michael Neill is emeritus professor of English at the University of Auckland.
