LoveDub: Textual Intercourse
By Jed Wolpaw
The other day I was talking…well, OK, Skyping…with a good friend of mine who is spending the year in India. He told me he had recently purchased a scooter to get to and from work. I live in San Francisco, so as part of my rental agreement I have to think highly of scooters. I praised his newfound method of commuting and then asked the first thing that came to mind. “Do you have a helmet?”
Yes, he said, he has a helmet. Well, in my extensive experience (read: watching Slumdog Millionaire twice) I haven’t seen a lot of helmets on the streets of major Indian cities. So I asked him what percentage of other scooter riders wear helmets. 20%, he said. But get this: Most of them don’t wear the helmets on their heads. They hold them in their laps.
At first I was confused. But then it hit me: Brilliant! These riders are clearly protecting both their means of reproduction and their cell phones while all the while surreptitiously texting.
All this talk about texting while driving laws here in the good old U S of A won’t do any good. If people will sacrifice their heads to keep their cellphones text-ready, they will surely be willing to risk a small fine.
So all these laws will accomplish is to force texting-while-driving underground (or under helmet, so to speak). People will keep their phones lower in their laps, making them have to squint at the screen to see what they are trying to read and thus taking their eyes off the road for longer and longer.
The problem is that we’ve gotten so sucked into a world of instant gratification and instant communication that we can’t handle waiting even for trivial interactions. Most texts, emails and calls are far from urgent, but we don’t want to wait even to read things like “who you go to the show with last night?” and “I didn’t go to the show last night” and “My sister-in-law’s baby cousin Tracey went to the show and she said she saw you there….you ain’t got to lie, Craig, you ain’t got to lie”.
OK, so maybe I just saw Ice Cube’s “Friday” for the 20th time. But the point is, we live in a culture that has, for the most part, forgotten about the value of being alone with one’s thoughts. We’re either texting, talking, writing or reading email, listening to music, watching TV, or sleeping and dreaming about sending more text messages. Not many people take a walk or a car ride alone in silence, with the radio and cell phone off, just thinking.
“So what?” you might ask. Well, people’s brains are starting to atrophy. At least the part of the brain that thinks independently. People are relying more and more on external input, whether from friends via text message or from opinionated talk show hosts on the television or radio. If Glenn Beck sounds so confident, maybe I’ll just let him do my thinking for me. It’s a lot easier than doing it myself. Of course, that misses the point that psychotic people are often very confident in their delusions, but that’s a subject for another day.
We send and receive texts so quickly we don’t think about what we’re texting, or what we’re doing while we’re texting. The 24-hour news cycle is constantly producing new information and opinions on that information, and we can check it and recheck it all the time. To write a letter, sit and think about it, edit it, think some more, and eventually send it is becoming an antiquated endeavor.
Forget about stopping texting while driving for safety’s sake. If we don’t carve out some text-free, TV-free, radio- and music-free time in our lives we’re going to become a nation of Glenn Beck listening automatons driving around town on scooters with our helmets between our legs, texting with both thumbs, steering with our knees and assuming Glenn will tell us when, and if, we need to turn left, or right or stop.
Questions/Comments: lifeaccordingtojed@gmail.com, www.lifeaccordingtojed.blogspot.com
This article appeared in the October 8, 2009 issue of Synapse.