Titled: "If the Titanic Sank Today"
I was on a flight in the last year or two, and a passenger was having a loud verbal altercation with a flight attendant. As I raised my head to look, I saw a sea of phones held vertically by one hand above the seat backs...each one identically showing the altercation in miniature on the screen. It was deeply creepy to me.
But there is another memory that it etched in my memory that is not creepy, but sad.
I was driving by the old Tower Records, a landmark building on Newbury Street in Boston just before it went out of business (ironically, by the same dynamic of portable music available on demand via the Internet) and as I passed, there were probably 20-30 people waiting for a bus. The sun had gone down less than a half hour ago, so it was dark, but remnants of the sunken sun still lingered on the horizon opposite them to the West.
Every single one of those people, with no exception, had a phone in one hand at chest level with their head inclined downward, their faces uplit by the light of their phone screens.
Every single one of them.
I just got a single instant glimpse of this as I drove by, this mass of people engrossed in their phones. The window in which I saw them was probably a one second, perhaps two second interval at most, as I was driving. But something about it burned the sight indelibly into my memory.
These people had no awareness of what was going on around them. They probably didn't see the big Neon Citgo Sign near Fenway Park. They didnt' see the hustle and bustle of people and cars around them. They had no idea the sky was a gorgeous hue of dark indigo with only the slightest shades of red and pink on the distant horizon hiding the sun, against which the branches of the trees were silhouetted in stark black.
They saw none of this. And I find that deeply troubling and sad. There is an entire generation of people who have never seen a concert, a sporting event, a mountain range, a wedding, a natural disaster or any number of other things except through the prism of a cell phone camera.
I simply don't think that is either good or healthy.