Always a keen observer of contemporary life my good friend Currado Malaspina is not as aloof from popular culture as one might have assumed. Currado stays keenly abreast not only of uniquely French societal shifts but also trends and inclinations within the rest of Europe as well.
His current hobby-horse is the so-called smart-phone addiction.
The commonplace and primitive understanding of human potential limits our capacity to performing one task at a time. This formulation, as anyone under the age of thirty-five will tell you, is a relic. An entire generation has acquired the deft, practical skill of eating full meals, talking on the phone, checking the internet and texting all while expertly navigating a mid-sized car through complex urban traffic. The occasional accident or fatality not withstanding, most of the time this practice is carried off with routine efficiency.
What Malaspina doesn't understand is that the smart-phone is a modern miracle and ignoring its potentialities would be like ignoring similar technological advances that have markedly improved our quality of life.
Where would we be without automated telephone responses when calling our doctors, utility companies and customer service departments? Remember those bleak years of being connected to breathing human beings whose limited empathy only served to exacerbate our stress?
And how about those dreary trips on public transportation before the age of the ear-bud? The buses and the trains were filled with people reading the newspaper and you know how depressing that can be. As if knowing about some war or natural disaster in some remote part of the world could actually change things.
Malaspina, with his characteristic penchant for exaggeration, sees all these high-tech developments as signs of dire intellectual decline and artistic decay. When he sees people sitting around a dinner table scrolling through their Facebook feed he sees only rudeness while most of us simply see boredom.
Physical social interaction does not, by definition, necessitate total cognitive or emotional engagement. That idea is as antiquated as the 8-track!
His current hobby-horse is the so-called smart-phone addiction.
What Malaspina doesn't understand is that the smart-phone is a modern miracle and ignoring its potentialities would be like ignoring similar technological advances that have markedly improved our quality of life.
Where would we be without automated telephone responses when calling our doctors, utility companies and customer service departments? Remember those bleak years of being connected to breathing human beings whose limited empathy only served to exacerbate our stress?
Malaspina, with his characteristic penchant for exaggeration, sees all these high-tech developments as signs of dire intellectual decline and artistic decay. When he sees people sitting around a dinner table scrolling through their Facebook feed he sees only rudeness while most of us simply see boredom.
Physical social interaction does not, by definition, necessitate total cognitive or emotional engagement. That idea is as antiquated as the 8-track!
What porn has wrought to sex, a subject dear to Malaspina, social media has done to intimacy and most people see that as a good thing. Thanks to the internet our cities and suburbs are no longer blighted by XX rated movie theaters and bookstores. And thanks to the smart-phone no one is expected to even feign any uncomfortable expression of interest or warmth.
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