The smartphone and I

I’ve been a diehard Apple user since Steve & Steve set up shop at a garage in Cupertino but after a brief fingering of the iPad two years ago, I found it to be of not much use in China at the time. I settled back on the reliable MacBook for my cyberspace requirements, skipping the numerous offerings of the famous iPhone altogether, relying more on the keyboard rather than the more proletarian voice of technological culture!

Now, in public places, I am definitely a dinosaur. Outside my second floor sunroom where I quietly but regularly stick the extra chopstick into the potted plants to aerate the soil and drip the precious water to the roots, the front pedestrian traffic underneath my view is that of people thumbing their smartphones to no end, or folks screaming into their cell.

There are seldom any accidents or anything untoward that happens, save the occasional irate walker rudely reminded to step aside after a blaring vehicular horn even as the drivers of newly minted foreign cars finger their cellphones with one hand and steer their car with the other.

When I listen to people talking on the phone, the gabbing is faster than the hundred-meter hurdles at the recently concluded International Track and Field run in Shanghai. They sound louder than the screams from the bleachers, too. If talk was cheap before, it has gotten cheaper today. I often wonder if the voice from the other end gets equal time to blabber, or the parties have enough time to digest the gist of incoming messages. In the street and on terminals like the subway, the train station and the airport, couples do not even bother to look at each other anymore. They are too preoccupied with their smartphones.

This shortened attention span, or non-clarity on which function of our smart machines is on (smartphones are getting to be a cross of the pad, phone, photo clicker, the pod, and a palm eyeliner checker), must be where U.S. diplomats claim that speaking to Chinese officials on matters like trade negotiations and island disputes is like conducting a well-orchestrated “dialogue of the deaf.” We’ll leave foreign affairs matters to the Ivy leaguers and Tsinghua illuminati.

We’ve traversed quite a few time zones this week, first heading for Beijing from Shenyang to catch a flight to Vancouver of British Columbia where HK human and financial capital escaped before Xianggang got turned back by HRM of the clipped accent to Zhongguo, finally making a pit stop in Calgary of Alberta tar sands fame on my way to hot and dry Dallas, Texas, where they are decrying the building of Keystone XL pipeline. The zig-zag routing was meant to cut cost.

Transit time, however, might be fine for teenagers and the adventurous young adult but for those who are frequently restroom-challenged, we can’t wait ’til we get to the diaper stage!

Zhongguoren Zue and Zu Yi from Shenyang to Beijing attached to their cellphones was par for the course to their cousins in Vancouver, home to one of the largest Chinatowns in the world, equipped with the latest from Samsung, Huawei, Nokia, and LG. Joseph and Josephine in Calgary were not exactly cuddled up in the corner either. They, too, were busy checking relations if everything was bonny well good. In Dallas, no-way-Jose was really out of the way as Josie kept talking with the ferocity of one still holding fort at the Alamo. We design our lives around the cellphone.

I am in Bonham, Texas, a few miles to the Oklahoma-Texas border by the Red River that flows into the Mississippi before it spews out to the delta and the Gulf of Mexico. On my farewell trip to North America, I am meeting for the last time with a covenant group I joined mid-’80s called the Realistic Living Institute. We tend to be big on human consciousness, not in its meta-use but in its common practical face. I will have to write about the group in another article to describe the corporate effort and give it full justice.

Suffice it to say that with a group committed to a week of introspection, meditation, and contemplation, the ubiquitous cellphone has not been silenced. Participants have a hard time shutting off the world for a week, focusing on themselves individually and as a corporate body. It is easier to go to the gym with all the machines and weights clanking the silence away. It takes more effort to flex the spirit in the gymnasium of the soul.

The smartphone is the Linus blanket of this generation, as the Texas male of an earlier time quickly drew his six-shooter, forsaking dialogue. The guys of my upbringing proudly palmed 9mm Beretta for comfort and safety with macho conceit and arrogant satisfaction. In the contrast of generations, I welcome the smartphone.

It’s a long month-and-a-half of bidding adieu to loved ones from the shores of Chicago by the lake to the foothills of Oakland by the San Francisco Bay, greeting four grandchildren, two apiece in each place. Were I documenting a trip for the memory lane, the smartphone might be a great tool. But I’m just breezing through so I will let the old eyes and ears, nose and taste buds, with old-fashioned skin contact to register images into the cranium. That will do me just fine!