Good Morning iPhones

We had eight guest iPhones for Thanksgiving dinner. Six were in the hands each of a son and the other five members present of his family. Four are teenagers or young adults; three are either high school or college student. They all share a bar of soap at home, but not a phone.

Two phones were in the hands of student guest visitors from Norway, brought to the table by fellow college student. Had I been wondering about the relative population density of phones across western Europe, and whether or not every pair of hands there too required its own phone, there was nothing here in this admittedly limited population to dissuade me of the universal need to clutch a phone.

On the morning after Thanksgiving dinner, I said “Good morning!” to some of the real people who had gotten downstairs before me, and no one even looked up.

I said, “Good morning iPhones!,” and no one laughed, or looked up. Then they and the rest ate breakfast with one hand attentive to a phone, maybe even sharing a bite of bagel and cream cheese with whomever was on the other side of the phone. Is that possible? Technology can be amazing.

Is it possible to even cream cheese a bagel with one hand?

What could they have missed overnight that was so, so essential to know now? Were their girlfriends or boyfriends up all night sending messages about every ripple of the sheet.? Were there life-or-death messages or critical business decisions afloat? The only one with the latter possibility spent his phone time following highlights of sports events. Reruns of great hockey shots and football runs.

It was like something happened in the world or in their personal lives that could not be left for a moment. Images of people on subways and airplanes come to mind. People in doctors’ offices; no matter their own medical needs, they must stay on-line until doctor needs their attention.

It used to be that people read books on subways and airplanes, and in doctor’s offices, and maybe over breakfast. That is as faded and worn as shredded blue jean knees after a hundred washing machine cycles and twenty belly slides across home plate.

Did I not already say, “No books in sight”?

Books are special because they have the capacity, collectively, to build an intertwined depth of understanding of human behavior and the world around us. They have the capacity to counteract a human tendency for tribalism. To build understanding about the complexities and even dangers in human behavior. They remind us that current events have almost always been played out before, somewhere else geographically maybe, somewhere else back in historical time.

Those are some of the reasons to be a lifelong reader. But what are the reasons for being in constant communication with the world through a handheld device, other than ones having to do with immediate needs of day-to-day business? Why travel for hours to be with family not often seen live and then leave them for bunches of time for an everyday electronic world?

I truly struggle with this misuse of technology. This loss of ground for books and reading. I bet that in this I am not alone.