people complain about mobiles phones and how, according to them, they actually and ironically don’t connect people but isolate them. i was thinking that perhaps these people are right in their observations, but not in their conclusions.
seems kids these days pay more attention to their mobile phones in class than they do to their teachers (“damn mobiles”, i hear grumpy teachers say). but not only kids exhibit this lack of attention ability. the image of a person, or two, or five looking down to their mobile phone’s screen during a meeting is now common in any team meetings in the offices of companies all around the world. almost not surprisingly, as i have these thoughts right now while i prepare my breakfast and i look through the window to the street outside, i see these workers doing reparations in the street from which one is driving a carving/hammering machine and opening some holes in the pavement while the other two, which perhaps are there to supervise, are busy with their mobile phones.
now, instead of doing the conventional and demagogic judgemental assertion “mobiles are the problem”, what if the mobiles were simply channelizing to the outside world the more embarrassing fact that, over all these years before we had mobile phones, people had been distracted and not “working” as we had expected without anybody noticing. perhaps it’s just that we no longer pretend.
cause i don’t see companies being less efficient than they were before due to the distracting mobiles, i don’t think the works in the street outside my apartment would be executed quicker if those two guys weren’t on their mobiles. the world keeps turning at the same speed i think. it’s that we were not as busy as we though perhaps, and while before we were thinking on donuts and boobs while the boss speaks, now we check facebook or twitter (which also have donuts and boobs).
so perhaps it’s US who are distracted by nature, and the phones are the symptom more than the cause?
