Provided to the QAM News
It’s been almost 6 years since I replaced my iPhone, and though peer pressure isn’t as strong as it once once, I still fear there is still a lot of it ahead. I know this because I just had the battery in my phone replaced for fifty bucks and it now holds a charge as long as it did when it was new from the box.
So why replace it?
The Apple Store Genius (I’m not being facetious, that’s what they are called) is my first challenge. He looks at my phone and just rolls his eyes. And while figuring out my syncing problem, he talks so fast with a tone so condescending I feel a thrum of panic rise in my chest.
And here I thought I was a smart, somewhat capable woman.
Whenever a techy treats me this way, as if I am unhip, unintelligent, because I can’t communicate at a clip about ... whatever he is talking about, I just sigh. I wanted to face him and dance a few ballet moves: Plié, Saute, Allegro, Arabesque, Pas De Bourrée, and roll my eyes at him when he can’t make out which movement is which, say how they interconnect, or pronounce their names. Pfft, what do my mean you don’t know?
The hardest part was convincing tech-support I really didn’t want a new phone. Not only am I not taking photos of everything that is happening, or beautiful, or simply there, I often feel that we have developed into a new species of humans who believe we can’t survive if we don’t record every detail of our lives.
Which is pretty much what an Apple employee said to me when iPhones were just starting to appear. I sat across from him on the Caltrain headed toward Cupertino (Apple’s hometown), and that is how he described his industry’s intent: to make us feel as if we literally don’t exist without our phones. “And we’ll get there,” he said, “one age group at a time.”
I took a deep breath, breathing in as he spoke, breathing out as I tried to imagine what the world would look like if everyone walked around with a tiny computer in their hand.
That world looked to me like a world addicted to distraction, not at all like a world I wanted to live in. I remember thinking that that world would dehumanize our reliance on each other for company, mess with our self-image, our ability to concentrate. It appeared like WALL-E on every corner, at every table in a restaurant, sleeping next to us at night. The images grew larger and larger in my head until I finally figured out what they were trying to tell me.
And today, well, here we are.
When I got off the train in Palo Alto, I sat down on a bench, breathless with the idea that one day soon we’d all be willingly possessed by a phone. I looked back at the train pulling away and saw that man’s eager eyes, saw my smile that was fear in disguise, saw a time ahead I didn’t quite trust.
Think what you like about prophecies, coincidence, or chance. To this day I feel as if I was on that train with someone with whom I was supposed to meet. Just so today, when I look around and see how real Apple’s strategy has become, it helps make my uneasiness a little more tolerable.
But there are times when my uneasiness becomes so agitated I need to intervene.
If you live in a northern climate, it can be hard to feel exactly when summer begins, but a few weeks ago summer arrived with all the luster and sunniness of a Hawaiian holiday. And down where the waves break over the beach pebbles, past the driftwood but before the murky seaweed, there were two girls, maybe thirteen or fourteen years of age, who wore bikinis. Bikinis with V-shape bottoms that made me remember a line I’d heard, is this what feminism has done for our daughters, brought out their inner burlesque?
I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. Not because the midafternoon sun had just found us and everything was suddenly more dazzling. But because the girls were—and you may want to prepare yourself—taking pictures of each other’s bums (okay . . . they were zooming in on their butt cracks!) in those itty-bitty thongs. I saw how young they were. How vulnerable. I felt a bit as if I was the only one who could save them. From themselves. I walked up and asked them to please, please, please, think twice before posting those images.
It almost frightened me to feel so driven by concern.
Maybe I should have just turned away and let Instagram have its way with them, but how could I?
What is more, I am not really willing to “mind my own business” (which is what one of the girls promptly told me to do) when worry comes on that strong, especially the part of me that can’t bear to imagine the people who would view those images.
I know that interfering like this just might be too pushy of me — jeez, today it could get me shot — and that maybe I should have just brought my phone to the beach and texted people miles away instead of paying close attention to the ones in front of me. And that this may be keeping me from adjusting to our new world and accepting it as it is.
But, to be honest with you, I wouldn’t even know how to begin to do that.
Mary Lou Sanelli is the author of Every Little Thing, a collection of essays that was nominated for a Washington State Book Award. Her previous titles include fiction, non-fiction, and a new children's title, Bella Likes To Try. She also works as a speaker and a master dance teacher. For more information about her and her work, visit www.marylousanelli.com.