You’ve gotta love technology, or at least respect it for the nifty things it’ll et one do. For instance, at this very moment, that is to say the moment that i’m writing this, not the moment that you’re reading this — indeed, that would be tough as you can’t read this until, at the very earliest, i’m done — I’m sitting in an airport terminal entertaining myself by writing to a bunch of non-existent readers, completely unaware of the annoying music from overhead, the whisper from the headphones of the guy sitting behind me, the fat guy snoring over to my left and the funny looking guys across from me. It’s swell, I’m completely immersed in my own little word, not to be bothered by the lady on her cell phone that obviously needs a more sensitive microphone. Ahhhh, technology.
*blinks at a snort from the comatose dude*
It’s actually kinda sad. I mean, how often in our daily lives do we get away from our usual crowd with several hours of basically free time in which to interact with others. Here are real live people, each with their own lives and stories and things to be shared and learned, and here I sit absorbed in this little electronic device speaking very possibly to no one at all.
I might feel a little worse about it if it were just me, but i think we all now differently. Anyone who has taken mass-transit or even just walked down the street of any decently sized city recently would have to be blind not to have noticed the tooling masses with their ipods and their cell phones and their newspapers and pretty much anything they can come up with to block out the rest of the world as they travel though their lives. Most people don’t even look up anymore, and any inadvertent eye-contact is quickly broken, a shaken and often embarrassed visage inevitably following. I know people have their moods and you can’t expect everyone to be friendly, even i have been known to be lost in a novel during a train ride, but i didn’t expect nearly everyone to have the same sense of guarded solitude about them. I’m talking about entire subways full of people, not just some random folks in a bad mood.
Is it just my naiveté that makes me thing there was a friendlier time, when people weren’t so eager to shut out the rest of the world? Sure it’s easier to lose oneself in their distraction of choice and not deal with any of it, but what do we learn from that, indeed, where is the fun in that? I’ve heard it explained away as, “My morning commute it the only time I have to myself.” Maybe it’s cause i’m still a tourist. I haven’t lived IN a major metropolis long enough to have become truly jaded yet, and if that’s what i can expect from such and experience, perhaps I’ll stay in the suburbs. Sure the streets are cleaner here and the drinks are cheaper, but hopefully it’ll take me a while longer before I zone out and stop looking around.