Throwaway Culture: Death and the Cellphone

on January 16, 2014

My local news station, NBC affiliate Kare 11, sometimes puts aside its long standing tradition and actually reports the news. Not that the particular juxtaposition of two incidents, several thousand miles apart, struck them as worthy of comment, but none-the-less they broke the news that on Monday January 13th, cell phones had killed three people, in two cities, in the space of a few hours.

Chad Oulson was texting during a film in Florida. The presence of one screen wasn’t enough of a distraction, I guess. Mr. Oulson was asked to stop by Curtis Reeves, a man who was sitting behind him. When Mr. Oulson refused, a fight started, escalated and ended when Mr. Reeves shot Mr. Oulson fatally in the chest.

Ken Hoang was out with friends taking snapshots of the icy Chicago River when he dropped his phone. He threw himself into the water after it and his two friends followed to try and save him. When all was said and done, Ken Hoang and his friend Lauren Li were dead beneath the surface of the freezing water.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Pope Francis was delivering his ‘State of the World’ remarks. The Pope of perpetual surprises, he cut to the core of the three deaths, without even being aware that they had occurred. Condemning our ‘throwaway culture’ he said, “Unfortunately, what is thrown away is not only food and dispensable objects, but often human beings themselves, who are discarded as unnecessary.” The throwing away of three human lives over the bundles of wires we carry in our pockets is tragic. But these deaths occurred not just because of the cell phones, but because of a few popular fallacies surrounding them.

A sign that human virtue still exists is the presence of incomprehension and confusion following a public death. After any one of our recent school shootings, a man on the street will say to a faceless television audience, “How could this have happened? I just don’t understand.”

With these deaths though, I do understand. Many is the time I have loathed the man in the theater who couldn’t be without the internet for a couple of hours. Many is the time I have beheld a crimson sunrise and instinctually reached for my cellular, hoping to capture that beauty and save it for later. In other words, I know what Mr. Reeves and Mr. Hoang were both thinking.

When I do snap the photo, I always discover that the beauty has eluded me. The resulting image is always smaller than the original subject. Not simply a matter of scale, it is a matter of sublimity. A sunrise holds me captive. In my phone that sunrise is captive to me, but it is my loss. It is in the nature of beauty to be arresting, it is not in its nature to be arrested.

A sunrise, like everything else in the world, is a passing thing. While it is alive it burns with furious glee, but like the matches I use to light my pipe, the flame is quickly exhausted. To try and hold that fire in our pocket is to miss what made the sunrise beautiful in the first place. It is a temporal beauty, not suited to being saved for an indeterminate time.

Or take another example; the virtue of a photograph of a baby is not the photograph itself. Mementos are all well and good because they are reminders. The photograph of the baby is beautiful because somewhere there is a burping, giggling, gurgling, crawling and crying bundle of life who at one time looked just like that picture. The man who carries that photo will pay it no heed when he encounters the actual child. We cannot play with, bathe, tease or tickle a photograph.

This then is the myth of the cell phone. It promises to contain the wideness of the world, but delivers the narrowest possible hole we can bury ourselves in. Our friends, our family, our likes, our dislikes, where we’ve been and where we’re going, movies we’ve seen and books we’ve read are all shrunk down to a few manageable bits of data, displayed on an equally manageable screen the size of a playing card. But the world isn’t that small. Its largeness was what made it worthy of remembrance in the first place. Suppose the phone is a picture of the world, therefore a reminder of the world. Shouldn’t we ignore it when the real thing crawls over to us?

Our phones give us the ability to capture, but we give up the chance to discover. With phones we forget the virtue of distance. The phone is always held a foot away from the face, the handheld screen being the focus of our attention. But any person of sanity ought to know that 12 inches is much too close for a rattlesnake, but much too far for a lover. In other words, on a screen everything is equal because everything is flat. Yet the depth of the world is a necessary ingredient for joy. Every race, every climb, every first kiss is sublime because a depth has been reached, a distance has been crossed. Mankind rejoiced when it discovered the world was not flat. How much more will it rejoice when it rediscovers that fact?

For, it is plainly obvious that the world of the cell phone is not as interesting as the real world. On the contrary, it is rather boring. Consider the hilarity that would erupt should we create an actual search engine. Consider the great racket to be made by a go-cart screaming down the aisles of a library, the driver madly scanning a card catalogue as though it were a road map.

The tragedy of Ken Hoang is that he wanted to capture the Chicago River and keep it in his pocket. The desire to have and to hold the whole world in our pockets is the desire that has fueled the cellular market since it began. Each smart phone brings more memory, more Internet, more music, more contacts, more everything. The storing of a photo is almost antique compared to the other things Ken could have been doing with his phone at the time. But great truths can only be forgotten, never falsified. A man may gain the whole world yet lose himself. The tragedy of Ken Hoang is that he tried to capture and keep the cold and the ice of the Chicago River, but the cold and the ice of the Chicago River captured and kept him.

While many will still wait with anticipation for the next phone, or gadget or app, despite the deaths that have come from this mania; I will be waiting for another, a non-fictional, three dimensional, living and breathing, John Connor.

 

  1. Comment by Daniel on January 16, 2014 at 12:24 pm

    Don’t forget the lives lost by texting while driving, like the idiot young women I watched a few days ago merge from an entrance ramp into my lane at 65 mph and almost collide with me; all while she was driving with one hand and texting with the other. Except for practicing defensive driving, she would have collided with me and caused a serious rush hour accident. Oh, did I mention it was dark when this happened. If I thought it would do any good I would have pulled over and called the state police to report her, but I know nothing would have happened.

    I wonder how things would have been different if Mr. Reeves had called the police after Mr. Oulson threw his popcorn at Mr. Reeves and told the police he had just been assaulted in a movie theater. I suppose Mr. Reeves could also have gone to theater management asked to have Mr. Oulson removed and requested a free ticket for another showing of the movie.

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