The other day, five people of both sexes walked past me on the street: two were telephoning, two frantically texting and in danger of tripping over, one was walking along holding the object, ready to answer any sound that promised human contact.
One cultured and eminent friend of mine has thrown away his Rolex because, he says, he can now check the time on his BlackBerry. Technology had invented the wristwatch so human beings didn’t have to carry a pendulum clock around their neck or pull a pocket watch out of their waistcoat pocket every few minutes, and now my friend has to walk around, whatever he’s doing, with one hand perennially busy. Humanity is losing the use of one of its limbs, and yet we know how much two hands with opposable thumbs have contributed to the evolution of the species.
It occurred to me that when people wrote with a goose quill they needed just one hand, but with the computer keyboard we need two, and so the telephone addict cannot use a telephone and PC at the same time. But then, I thought, cell phone addicts don’t need their PC, which today is prehistoric, since the cell phone can connect to the Internet and send text messages, nor do they have to send emails when they can talk directly to the person they wish to pester or by whom they wish to be pestered. It’s true that their consultations of Wikipedia will be more difficult and therefore more rapid and superficial, their written messages will be more telegraphic—whereas with email they can even write The Screwtape Letters—but telephone addicts no longer have the time to gather encyclopedic information nor to express themselves clearly because they’re too busy in conversations. These are conversations about whose syntactical consistency we learn a great deal from those much-criticized instances of telephone interception, from which it can be deduced that phone addicts, spurning moreover all concerns about secrecy, express their plans with ellipses and a few such Neanderthal interpolations as “shit” and “fucking hell.”
This reminds me of the film Love Is Eternal While It Lasts, directed by Carlo Verdone, in which a pert young woman transforms sexual intercourse into a nightmare: as she rides on the stomach of her partner she’s forever answering urgent messages. In an interview I gave to a Spanish journalist, who seemed otherwise bright and intelligent, he commented with amazement that I hadn’t interrupted our conversation once to answer my cell phone, concluding therefore that I was most courteous. He couldn’t imagine that either I had no cell phone or I kept it switched off because I didn’t want it for unsolicited messages, only for checking my diary.
2013