Everybody has a kind of YouTube thumbnail that never fails to hook them in. For me it’s an overhead shot of an everyday carry bag with its contents lined up on a table – a notebook, an e-reader, a dumbphone, a 3DS or PSP, a pocket knife and a compact point-and shoot-camera.
I remember when I was able to write poems on the tiny 3.5 inch touchscreen of my HTC phone in a delivery room in a maternity ward during my first child’s induction. I was always distracted but that didn’t keep me from making things and getting into tedious, multi-paragraph arguments on philosophy php forums.
I had one of those bone fide BMX housing estate childhoods – where a network of mums took turns keeping an eye from flat windows, not to keep us from injuring ourselves but to stampede towards us raging the moment we did.
Every item lined up on that thumbnail table would still have been considered a luxury back then, even the fancy-yet-minimal notebook.
But they pull me in every time because their implicit message is “Phone did it. Phone broke you. Phone broke world. Phone fault.”
My eldest child’s school has also fallen for the current phone bad snake oil, that all we have to do is take away phone and the kids will be alright, just like we were when we got drunk in boxy orbital fields and broke into cars in order to fence stereos for something slightly stronger.
It also reminds me of the original hype for the tech we’re all trying to get away from, in the sense that it was about having a computer, library, camera, tv, games console and phone in your pocket but now having the same but in a bag is being pitched as a return to authenticity.
The twentieth century denizen was not a kind of undistracted monk. They were as tired and distracted as the rest of us. They worked their arses off to get a patch of grass, a little box to sleep in and put their feet up during a time when such things were considered more a right than a premium. They sat around a glowing box that flickered dreams and nightmares like their ancestors once sat around fires. None of them asked for any of this.