Living In Cyberspace

TRUE STORY: college football player decides he's lonely, goes online, gets involved in a video game called "Warlock", or some such. He likes it. It creates a sense of community, which, for some reason, he doesn't have on the football team or in his classes, people with similar passions. Then too, there's the adrenalin, the drama, and the seductive world of fantasy, so much more appealing than mundane reality. The hours turn into days, and forty five days later our man is still online, fighting for or against warlocks, or whatever. He survives on an hour of sleep per night, and pizza delivered via text message ordering. Whether he wears diapers is unknown. Don't ask. Fortunately, the pizza is not delivered by drone; he is forced to actually speak to a real, living, breathing high schoolish pizza delivery human at least once a day, if only fleetingly, as he hands over his debit card and as the pizza boxes and pounds pile up. Pizza is easy to order, easy to receive, and easy to eat without paying attention. Incidentally, the coursework and football career go out with the trash, which never goes out of his dorm room. Not enough time for such trivialities, in his endlessly exciting cyber world. His mother tries to reach him, as do others, to no avail. Finally, she gets through, and the story has a happy ending, as he is dragged into rehab, rehabbed, and ends up thriving, though probably on a different football team and life path. This is not an isolated incident. It is a mainstream American narrative, played out every day all across the fruited plain, as millennials by the million stride across college campuses, staring at their upraised palms, oblivious, but somehow, for the most part, surviving. Millennials, unlike baby boomers or even Gen X folk, are uniquely suited evolutionarily to surviving on the streets as android zombies. On a major college campus with twenty seven thousand students I never saw anyone walking across campus without being in smart phone zombie-land, and, miraculously, I never saw anyone walk into a car, a telephone pole, a water fountain, or another zombie. But it happens. Too often. People who stand at the edge of a cliff in their I phone world stop dead on the street, and look down, jolted alert by the real time sidewalk at their feet. People wandering through the streets looking for the treasure to which they are being guided through clues forget that they are actually on the streets, the real streets, and walk into walls, forgetting that the wall is real, not digital. Electronic entertainment devices, like crystal meth, are highly addictive. We know this after watching people becoming addicted since the introduction of the smart phone in 2007. Cocaine works on the body and mind, E gadgets work on the mind, which works on the body. Same result, alternative route. The attention span of the average American has now plummeted from a hefty twelve seconds to a more meager eight, one less than the nine second capability of a goldfish. This has been tested and proven. Gold fish can focus for longer than can we. Are we now satisfied that we now know why face to face conversation is no longer possible? Its because it no longer happens. If I talk face to face to another American for more than a minute, I've noticed, about anything other than the other American, I get that same old glassy eyed look. The person is gone, bored stiff. Whenever, in the course of what now passes for a conversation, I happen to be talking, and the other guy's phone rings, he always looks at it, decides that this is a call which absolutely must be taken now, mumbles an apology, and is gone. If the other person is talking, and I listening, and her phone jingles a cute tune, the call or text is ignored, or dismissed as postponable after a perfunctory glance. Maybe that's a good thing; people still like to talk, even if they hate to listen, which most Americans do. And its only going to get worse, you've doubtless gleaned, as the world of temporal reality descends ever further into climatic and socio-economic chaos, and technology inexorably advances towards temple chip implant heaven. Looking forward to seeing either you, or your holographic image on a screen near you, God speed, and, by all means, text me.