I remember walking down the street as a youngster, a man was walking towards me from the opposite direction, as he got closer he suddenly beamed and said; "Hello!" Despite not knowing who this chap was I, being a polite young fellow, said "Hello" in response, but as the last remnants of that final 'o' whistled out of my maw this man had begun another sentence, one completely removed from the conversation, almost as if the man were hearing voices in his head...
It was around this time that I realised he had a hands free mobile phone doo-dah wrapped around his ear as if he were some extra from Star Trek and he wasn't bidding me a friendly 'Hello' on an early morning, instead he was answering a phone call and probably hadn't even noticed the dopey young adult shuffling up the hill towards him.
Since that nonversation (that's a conversation where neither person is actually talking to one another) the rise of hands free tele-communications has grown exponentially with more and more people preferring to do their chatter without clutching a small rectangle to their lobe, instead preferring to speak into tiny microphones secreted about their personage. But, to me, this blurs the line between whether someone is actually having a phone conversation or just talking to themself or, perhaps, talking to me.
The strangest part of making the apparatus to hold one's phone conversation smaller and smaller is that by contrast people's public telephone manner is getting louder and louder. Is it a direct result of not having to speak into such a specific object that makes people project their conversations more? Or is that the technology isn't quite up to scratch yet and people still need to bellow down the line to make sure the phone doesn't cut out that all important syllable when they're telling their mother they'd 'like to take her up the country'?
Personally I hate talking on the telephone, whether it's a mobile or a landline, a phone conversation, to me, generally should be a brief arrangment of facts or directions, guidance for where the 'real' conversation is going to take place. Yes, there are exceptions, long distance relationships for example, but these phone conversations have been equally frustrating by the twitchiness of my Skype connection. Anyway...
This weird phenomenom seems to be rippling out across all technology nowadays though; from clunky portable CD players, portable DVD players and big fat books we now have tiddly tiny ipod nanos, teeny weeny mobile video devices and wafer thin e-readers. Each device can deliver any kind of entertainment or information to you with absolute discretion, you can be sat on the bus reading a book about any sordid subject and nobody will be any the wiser because the cover-art won't give you away, the headphones will be just quiet enough or the thumbnail sized screen can be safely enclosed within the cup of your hands.
You should make sure though that if you are looking at such material on public transportation that you bare in mind that people can see over your shoulder. I was standing in the vestibule area on a train once and there was a chap sat in the seat right in front of me looking at pictures of a woman spreading her legs - and what was between them - as far as she could without doing herself an injury.
But what's even more baffling, to me, about all this is that these devices that we are trusting to keep our personal entertainment private are now linked up to all of our social media profiles and telling everyone who 'friends' and 'follows' us exactly what we're watching/hearing/reading on these little gizmos. It is just like having an invisible telephone but still yelling your conversation for all to hear, and inadvertantly respond to. Why do we want objects that make what we're doing more private but make what we're doing on them more public? I don't want to know what my friends are doing unless they feel these things are worth telling me about.
Technology is starting to take the fun out of having friends...
"I watched War Horse last night."
"Yes, I know, the internet told me."
"I thought it was..."
"...shit, yes, I know, you gave it 3 stars on IMDB, you read the Empire review afterwards and commented that Empire is 'Spielberg's bitch' and then listened to the entire soundtrack on Spotify before spending the rest of your evening ploughing your fields in Farmville."
"Oh."
Is there a moral to this ramble? Probably not. I'm just concerned that we're going to be living in a future where we all walk around looking as netural and normal as everyone else, except those people subscribed to our 'life feeds' will be exposed to a long list of the horrible embarassing, mundane, menial, depraved and stupid stuff we waste our lives experiencing. Anyway, I should stop ranting, I haven't checked Facebook in about ten minutes and I'm worried I'll be missing out on the latest adorable picture my so-called friends have re-posted.
