The World at Our Thumbs

On the first Sunday in November, I traveled by train to Tegernsee, a lake that lies southeast of Munich within the approaches of the Bavarian Alps. The outing served as a welcome break from city confinement. I hadn’t been out of Munich in many months and very much needed, literally, a breath of fresh air. Nor was I disappointed. What awaited me was the gentle magnificence tourists hope for when they travel from all over the world to spend a few days here. Everything conspired to perfection: the weather, the landscape, the atmospheric moodiness of early Autumn sweeping up in fragrant breezes from the lake to those hiking through the heavily wooded slopes of the adjacent hills.

As my companion and I descended to a lakefront path along which we passed small boathouses and modest jetties, I spied two loungers on a pier, reclined lazily against each other and – oblivious to their surroundings – thumbing their smartphones. I winced inwardly to be reminded of the office, of technical minutia, of tedium and bother. Could they possibly be in search of something better than what they had here and now in this sunshine by this gently lapping water? My elation reasserted itself as we moved on and I returned my attention to the sunshine, to the breeze, to the flights and plunges of the waterfowl. But I didn’t forget them. Those shadows lay there still, absorbed in their devices.

Thank Steve Jobs and his ilk for that. Jobs especially is touted as a genius for not only giving the masses exactly what they wanted, but for leading them out of the cave, so to speak, in doing so; enabling them to finally emerge as the beings of consummate acumen, knowledge, and power they suspected they were all along. Yet why elevate Jobs as the great angler? All kinds of bait are dangled in front of us week after week. It’s simply his hook we leapt to. Calling Jobs the ecumenical wizard may merely expose our reluctance to concede what fishes we are.

My doubt, however, is whether Mr. Jobs has done us a favor in providing something we apparently needed so badly that we can’t get enough of it now. Fifty years ago, we eight- to ten-year-olds were wild about walkie-talkies. Those unexpected, extravagant birthday presents opened up to us a magic world. You could talk to someone who wasn’t there. You could strap it to your body and crawl into undiscovered bushes while your secret agent partner fed you wisdom from distant eyes and ears as you spied out the enemy. It made you the unknown quantity. Very important, of course, was the fact the enemy didn’t have one. Very important was the fact that the enemy didn’t even know about them, as long as Uncle Elmer hadn’t told. Those instruments conferred a euphoric sense of omniscience and power like nothing we had known before. But the phase of the walkie-talkie slipped away even as its sparkle continued to charm our childhood reveries.

Adults have had phones for years and I suppose at first its power also cast magic across the lives of the people using them; we just can’t imagine it now. What we can remember is the enthusiastic reception the cell phone received. And what boon did it bestow? Ask Uncle Elmer. Mobility. The phone no longer belonged to a building or a booth, was no longer anchored to the wall by the hall table with rubbery wires; it belonged to you. It equipped you. You moved and it moved with you. You received calls no matter where you were; people not present could feed vital information to you from distant eyes and ears. Sound familiar? It lent a sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency; the same safe-all-over feeling a five-year-old gets pulling a blanket over his head; the same sense of invulnerability the walkie-talkie dazzled us kids with so many years ago. While such feelings never flared – they characterize a child’s excitement, after all – neither did we outgrow the cell phone. It has, in fact, become indispensible.

Yet, while cell phones support communication, its popular addendum, texting, does not facilitate exchange of ideas. The patterns stored to generate text cannot support that. What texting helps us do is coordinate, and even the range of signals required for that is quite limited. Most of us visit a meager range of geographies and establishments week after week, so in telling our most frequently contacted friends and family where we are, we’re only telling them what they probably already know. What they would like to find out is when we’ll arrive. Nor is such information trivial: we can report that we missed the train, are stuck in traffic, or have been hijacked. That kind of information marshals armies. A hundred years ago forces so equipped would have ruled the world. Until Uncle Elmer told the other side.

What the smartphone adds to the walkie-talkie is access to social media sites. Cell phone users can look at photos, review events, and get as close to exchanging ideas as they ever do by following links posted by friends to glance at Web pages those friends thought they liked in the fraction of a second they probably spent looking at them.

For a population on the go, this is all very useful. What puzzled me that Sunday at Tegernsee was the behavior of the pier people. They had coordinated, hooked up, made it. There they were on a peaceful pier on a perfectly flawless day. And what did they do? Checked their smartphones for SMSs; thumbed up Tweets; texted absent ones. The “grass is greener” adage held still; those out of reach must be captured; the ones in your presence – including lakes, breezes, and sunshine – become, by virtue of their imbecile attendance, dross.

The real danger, of course, is that we will while away our golden afternoons on Tegernsee by immersing our attention in some other where through the adroit instrumentation of pseudo-transcendence, not because we are informed by it, not because we are enriched by it, but because for some reason we can’t put it down. That’s the kind of product merchants like to sell. And since they are the ones selling it and since it’s legal, they’re pleased to tell us we can’t put it down because we need it so much.

What has made us such broad targets is our tendency to chew the cerebral cud. We plan. We anticipate events with relish or dread. We reflect on past occurrences to our grief, embarrassment, or enrichment, depending on our temperament. But few people of my acquaintance have the capacity to become so absorbed in what they are actually doing that they can reliably recall sequence of events – cause and effect, if you will – circumstances, details, as if they were still there. These people are our scientists, explorers, and guides; they can tell me where I’ve been and get me back to where I was, while my report is confined to what country I was in and if it was raining or not. Those people do not fall victim to the rapture of the smartphone. It is we who so willingly reflect on the past or cheat ourselves of the present by spinning dreams of the future that are lost. Seldom in present time, we risk total estrangement with smartphones by our sides.

So does such estrangement make us more likely to plunge into shattering smartphone-induced engagements like southeast-Asian rebellions? Or does possession of a cell phone and good mobile phone service make us as contentedly apathetic as the looks of a pot-bellied pig? I don’t know. One thing I do feel is writ large: after the rebellion, return to the masses adequate Internet access for their smartphones and they will subside in short order. By virtue of their enormous sizes today, political structures will only continue to refine their stranglehold over their constituents with all the subtlety technology affords. They need only provide the trappings of democracy – not in little part granting us the freedom to buy what we choose, including political candidates – and we will continue to make honey for them, insouciant within enslavement, snuggled in our bubbles under the crust of nuclear winter, cozily lit by our smartphones, the world at our thumbs, the present perfectly irrelevant.

Indeed, what’s in that name, smartphone? As we consumers have told the industry very clearly, lots.