“Look up!” called my partner. I whipped my head around, but he wasn’t speaking to me. He was speaking to the young woman about to collide with us on the footpath. She looked up from her phone, jolted back into her surroundings, and altered course.My partner shook his head. “You watch. She’ll walk into a pole.”I turned around and saw her, head back down in her phone, about to cross a road. It might be worse than a pole, I thought.
I am passionate about the importance of disconnecting from the online world. I have written a book about the significance of solitude. But technology is so pervasive, soI should know better. I should know better because I understand the impact ofon our attention spans, our self-esteem, our capacity for reflection, our creativity, and our emotional regulation. I should know better because I see the erosion of truth in the online world, which in turn leads to real-life divisiveness and harm.
My daughter, skipping ahead, missed the entire thing, but my face-plant was witnessed by several passersby. It was humiliating, perhaps even more humiliating than accosting an innocent stranger with a meme. For months after that episode, I kept my phone zipped in my bag whenever I was out of the house.But I dropped my guard and relapsed, and it was not my fault.
The tech giants are not going to help us. They want us sucked into the vortex. They make money when our heads are stuck in our screens.