Frankly, I’m not the most credible person when it comes to talking about smart phones. I have a dumb phone – a Samsung throw-away-phone that doesn’t even have a camera. But – there is one thing I’m proud of …
When I was sitting in the fashionable bar of the fashionable hotel OMM in Barcelona last Saturday, right in the epicenter of the world’s biggest mobile congress GSM, it felt like being a communicational Orc surrounded by hordes of elves, hobbits and dwarves. All the others were the light – iPhone 5, iPhone 5, iPhone 5, iPhone 5, … I was the darkness!
Another app bites the dust – the mobile world around me is moving faster and faster and faster. I remember my friend and digital prophet Henrik Sprengel telling me a year ago: How can you be a communication expert, if you’re not up to date in digital communication?
Good point. I’m still struggling with the answer. Probably I’ll give up anytime soon. For the time being, I just feel sad for what I witness every day.
Last Saturday at the hotel OMM I experienced the Armageddon of interpersonal communication.
I was sitting there with my son Alvaro doing some co-drawing while we were waiting for friends from Hamburg. On the sofa right next to us, a couple. An English-speaking couple. They’d arrived shortly after us. They ordered a round of Gin Tonics. Then it started.
For more than one hour (!!!) both of them drowned in their iPhones. Not one single word. Not one! Not one smile either. Just staring, typing, staring, typing. Stereotyping. Silence.
I wondered how both of them would have sex. Probably, lying next to each other in bed, she sends a request via Whatsapp:
Do you want to have sex, honey?
No, darling, I’m still checking my facebook mail.
No problem, we chat tomorrow then. Good night, honey!
Good night, darling!
Guys, I don’t know about you, but don’t you think we’re losing it?
I might have a dumb phone, but I’m proud of not having lost it yet.
I travel by bus and… read. I sit on the tube and… write. I have dinner with friends and… talk.
Whatsapp with you? Do you still read and write and talk?
Ivette
I totally agree! Specially teenagers seems they have their social life “in” the screen, however you don’t need to have a dumb phone to avoid it. You just need to have common sense (not very common lately) and keep the smartphone in the pocket. Good luck! 😛