Tag Archives: Cell phones

Spring Calling–Are You There?

07 Monday May 2018

Posted by in Cell phones, Seasons, Spring

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Spring has come at long last to the Great American Midwest. The days are beautiful, breezes sunny and mild. Birds sing from every tree, vying for coveted nesting places, chasing one another joyously through the air. Down in the area I call Cypress Hollow, where I turn around on my morning run to head back home, two ducks have paired up. I watch eagerly, hopefully, for the appearance of their ducklings. Nobody can talk about anything except the weather. Okay, this being St. Louis, the weather and baseball—but then the two are closely tied to one another.

Here’s a thing I want to talk about. I am a librarian. Librarians, traditionally, have had a conflicted relationship with cell phones. We oversee places that are much better when they are quiet. Yes, we have long despised the stereotype of the shushing librarian, but the fact is, if we do not shush noisy people, other people will usually approach the desk to demand why not. This goes doubly for people using cell phones in libraries. Everyone rude enough to use a cell phone in a library believes they are keeping their conversation quiet, but there is simply no such thing as a quiet cell phone conversation. They are all, always and forever, disruptive to the general ambience, especially in a public library reading room, where ambience is our most precious commodity.

All this is by way of saying that I dislike the whole cell phone culture. It was a long time before I was forced to get one. I use mine regularly now, but not so regularly that I am seen walking about on public streets with the thing stuck in my ear, or my eyes glued to the screen, watching god knows what. I once said, and still believe, that there is only the thinnest line separating people who walk around talking on cell phones all the time and people who walk around talking to themselves.

So on a beautiful spring morning, when I am walking into the grocery store for something, and I pass a teenaged boy staring at his phone as if the ultimate answer were displayed there, I have the urge to shake him and say, ‘Look up! Listen! The sky is blue, the birds are singing, daffodils and tulips are blooming all around you.’ I don’t like to be too judgmental, the lad is wearing the uniform that indicates he works at the store, and is probably on a break. Maybe this is the only time he has in his busy morning to see if he has any messages. But somehow I doubt it.

I am troubled by young people growing ever more tied to their tiny, demanding devices. There are studies coming out all the time indicating that cell phone culture is detrimental to health, to attention span, to ability to perform well in school, and on and on. I was talking last night to a man who teaches art classes at a community college: he tries to get students to stay off their phones during class, but finds that they don’t because they can’t! They are truly addicted. My problem is that young people spend too much time focused on their phones rather than the nature around them.

Of course one of my major gripes with modern society is that we don’t spend enough time outdoors, we don’t cherish nature, we don’t watch the seasons come and go. But I find the problem growing worse with young people. How are they going to worry about whether earth’s climate is changing, and seek solutions to the problem, if they don’t even know what the climate is like now? But the problem could be even more pressing.

My friend asked me this morning about the meaning of ‘spring fever.’ Is it something to do with allergies? No, I explained, it is an expression indicating a longing for love and romance brought about by the warmer weather. Like in the Elvis Presley song ‘Spring Fever,’ a terrible song from the crummy movie ‘Girl Happy,’ with the wonderful lyrics:

The blossoms on the trees

Look at the honeybees . . .

Get up, get up, love is everywhere.

Love in springtime has been a motif of human existence since before we were recognizably human. Courtship and mating find their primetime when the sun grows warm and the days grow longer. But what will happen when young people no longer notice this? Can the species endure? There is cause for hope: there are always hormones, the other great fuse of courtship, and I have not read any reports noting a decline in them.

Someone should create an app that tells cell phone users when it is the first day of each season, maybe plays an excerpt from Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ and provides a list of things that are traditionally done in that season. I’d download that, even I sometimes get so busy that I miss the first day of spring or summer. Of course, I’d have to ask a young person how to download an app . . .

Everything in Context

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by in Autumn, Cell phones, Context, E-books, E-readers, Fall, Mindfulness, Nature, Seasons, Technology

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I’m driving down the road and I see a woman with a baby stroller. She is staring at a little something in her hand, I can only suppose it is a telephone of some sort. She is probably reading a very important text message from a friend on her phone. Could be the tenth or twentieth very important message that she has received from that same friend today. Meanwhile I note that it is a beautiful autumn day, mild breeze, cool temperature, leaves of many colors and shapes scattered round the stroller where her infant lies, ignored.

The problem with much technology is that it takes us out of context. I wrote several months ago about running with earplugs pumping music into my head. In doing so, I missed things like birdsong and the whispering of breezes in the trees that line the road. I have never liked the idea of running on a treadmill. It’s tedious and artificial compared to actual running outdoors, where I get fresh air and experience the changes of the seasons. But carrying a little radio in my pocket and listening to music while I run removes me one step from the experience at hand.

I read an article yesterday about productivity at work. One of the techniques the productivity expert recommended was to leave your mobile phone or your Blackberry (he called it a ‘crackberry’) at home one day of the week. He suggested Saturday. I wonder how many people truly have to be advised to stop their constant communication with work during the weekend hours? What kind of life is it if you are always, more or less, ‘on call?’

But the thing is, it’s not just work. Increasingly, all of us, all the time, are on call. Almost everyone I know carries a telephone. They turn around and drive back home if they discover they’ve left for any outing, no matter how brief, without it. Then there’s social media, Facebook, Twitter, et al. The classic line in a postcard sent to friends or family, when someone is visiting a place remarkable for its scenery or architecture or just its climatic ambiance is ‘wish you were here.’ Now, we try to make them be here, in real time. We send tweets or post updates to Facebook saying, ‘I am hiking in the forest,’ or ‘I am walking on a beautiful starlit beach’–to which I want to respond, well, you were, but now you’re typing messages on your smart phone.

I am not the biggest fan of e-books, but I do read some. I use a Nook, a simple Nook that is only an e-reader. But already, people are starting to read on iPads and other devices that do many more things. People who really dislike e-books complain that they provide none of the tactile, almost sensual experience of holding a paper book and flipping pages. I understand the feeling, though I think I can get past it. What I can’t get past is the thought of diluting the intellectual and emotional experience of engaging with a text for an extended period because the device I am reading it on can also take me online to send messages, receive updates, and play games.

At work these days, I am in the middle of a project to build a new library. I attend weekly meetings with the general contractor, the architect and the construction manager. Each of these people sets a telephone on the table at the start of the meeting. They are courteous enough to turn off their ring tones, but you see them, during the course of the meeting, tapping its screen, checking on incoming messages, barely able to wait to get onto more important meetings than this one. I am the only person who is fully here, engaged only with what is happening in front of me.

We need to preserve context, which is a way of saying we need to try living in the moment we’re in. In my work and study about the seasons, I am always urging people to learn ways to live in the seasons, to observe the changes of the yearly cycle, to get out and experience them, even if only in small ways. It can enrich your life. It slows things down, makes it seem less like life is just zipping by in an endless round of work days and errands. But we are moving in the opposite direction. When we read, we are also somewhere else. When we talk with friends, we are also somewhere else. When we are working, eating a meal, watching a movie, grocery shopping, doing almost anything imaginable, we are also somewhere else. We are out of context in everything we do. How will we ever learn to experience nature in our daily lives, if we cannot even experience a conversation with a friend without it being diluted by technological intrusions?

And don’t think that I am unaware of the irony that as soon as I finish this post, I will post it to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, in addition to WordPress. When I say ‘we,’ I mean we. I’m working on it. I truly am.

Voices in the Air

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Cell phones, climate, Meditation, Mindfulness, Seasons, Weather

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When we were young, my older brother had this little do-it-yourself radio kit he liked to play with. It seemed to me to consist of nothing more than a few wires he strung up on Mom’s clothesline and some dials in a box. He would work at it all afternoon and finally pick up some faint music or someone talking vaguely from the distance. This was the early 1960s, the idea of radio flowing into our ears from multiple personal devices was off in the future: I was mystified by how he could be receiving anything with these wires and knobs. He attempted several ways to explain it to me, but finally condensed it into the only soundbite I recall from his lecture: there are voices in the air, and I’m trying to catch them.

How far we’ve come from this fascination with radio, or with long-distance communication. Now, what was a mystery has become a daily necessity. My daughter dropped her cell phone in the toilet at school the other day. Back home, she asked for rice to nestle it in, there being a rumor that this fixes a phone that has been dropped in the toilet, which, almost inconceivably to me, must be a common problem. Our pantry was not well stocked with rice at the crucial moment, which she took as an obvious sign of bad parenting and let us know about it. She immediately began to plead for a replacement telephone, asserting that each moment she had to spend without it also indicated our lack of parenting skill or concern.

Here’s the thing: I do not have, and I do not use, a cell phone. I’m not sure why, but I think I would rather lose a limb than carry a little telephone around with me all the time. I am fond of Garrison Keillor’s observation that ‘a cell phone makes a man a receptionist.’ I don’t want to be a receptionist. When I leave work, when I am alone, when I should have some quiet time amid a hectic day, I cherish that quiet time. I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear from you in those moments. I want to listen to Dvorak’s Serenade in A. I want to think about the next chapter of my book. I don’t want a text message telling me that you are driving home in traffic, that you are buying mangoes, that your favorite ballplayer got a hit. Good for you, but I don’t care.

Another blogger whose posts I enjoy reading (emptychalice.com) wrote recently about taking a Spirit Walk: just walking down the street for a distance in silence and being attentive to little things all around. He described the experience as being, in his elegant phrase, ‘a luxury of time.’ How little we do such things! We grow frantic in any moment spent without an electronic interface, some media washing over us, some communication on our devices. My daughter, after a few days of not having her telephone, was livid, stressed and distraught. ‘My life,’ she screamed, with no hint of irony, ‘is on my phone!’ I was embarrassed for both of us. This, more than anything she could have accused me of, made me feel like a bad parent.

When I am writing about the seasons, I am aware that modern life removes us ever more thoroughly from any meaningful interface with them. There are people who get into their cars in the garage, drive to work and park in an indoor parking lot, take the elevator up to their office, and then repeat the whole sequence in reverse, arriving back home to an evening of television without ever setting foot outside. It may be the dead of winter or burning hot summer, but it scarcely matters. We don’t experience it physically, and we keep our minds clogged with ephemera and trivia pumped into us constantly via assorted electronica.

I practice yoga every morning, and have done so for years. Someone asked me the other day if I also meditate, the two being linked in the popular imagination. No, I said, it has been years since I could clear my mind. And it’s true. I am always thinking about things, whether those things are worth a second’s thought or not. I can’t stop. I would like to have the ‘luxury of time,’ I would love to hear if the universe means to tell me anything. There are voices in the air, but we don’t need a kit to capture them. The voices we should be listening for can’t be captured, and most of what we receive is interference and background noise which it gets harder every day to filter out.