Tag Archives: technology

Old people shouldn’t text

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“Yes, but when do you become old?” My friend said this as soon as I uttered my headline above. Usually he just rolls his eyes at my proclamations. 

But here me out: I’ve told my kids there will come a day in the hopefully distant future when they will need to sit me down and say, “Dad, it’s really dangerous out there, and it’s time that we took some of your privileges away. This is for your own good and the well-being of perfect strangers.” Of course I am talking about my car keys. This prophylactic move is itself an outdated gesture, since everyone driving now has half an eye on the road and the rest of their eyes on their devices, so that even a legally blind but fully committed driver is probably safer, actuarially speaking. But now I might have to have the same conversation with them about my phone, specifically its ability to receive and send texts to large groups of people. 

Basically, it’s too fast. There is not enough friction, physical or monetary. It’s too easy to send out decontextualized language to your friends and family and internet friends and probable strangers. I’m not really talking about the unconsciously racist uncle post, though sure, that too. The whole problem with frictionless near-instant global communication is that people have terrible thoughts, expressed terribly, encountered at the worst possible time. It’s the future! 

What I mean is simpler: at some point, texting should be disabled on old people’s phones. For the sake of this idea, old people are defined as people much older than me. You know ’em when you see ’em. The technology is too powerful, like using a light saber to floss your teeth. It’s barely wielded safely by the youths out there. It’s no wonder those of us post-30 are endangered by these devices. 

This is most easily witnessed in the group chat, the noise rock of modern networked communication. The first problem with the group chat is that it’s bad qua communication. I don’t need seventeen thumbs-up emojis to clock everyone’s agreement. Text is faster than a phone call, but then it leaves all this shrapnel in its wake. And then someone wakes up and responds as if the chat is a one-to-one communication and the jokes go sideways fast. Or worst offense: the responder starts riffing unknowingly on another person in the chat. A group chat can be a wonderful thing. But negotiating the rhetorical demands of the chat can be like trying to pull an eyelash out of a drawer full of knives. When I am compelled to respond to large group chats, my answers are fully denuded of flair, a single Y or N to questions, as if I had actually fulfilled that promise to myself and gone back to flip phone land. It’s like throwing a party; if you didn’t write up the guest list, you don’t really know who’s there. Proceed accordingly.

A young person’s response to an older person sounding off unawares in the group chat tends to take two silent directions. First, there is the Michael Jackson-eating-popcorn-gif response. I wish I were this mature and/or callous. The second response, my response, is to emotionally absorb and project all the potential social ramifications of this faux pas, which when given the number of group chats that I am in — even as a non-popular person who is not young — generates a lot of psychic stress. Call it something catchy like “emotional labor.”

And honestly, maybe that’s the real problem. Maybe the old person who needs to have his texting taken away is me. I am mostly okay with the sending of the texts. But receiving them wears me out. It’s just so much language. And there is no hierarchy to it. Reminders from my dentist come at the same emotional volume as kid school notifications or cries for help from family members. There’s a riot in my pocket, and I’m terrible at prioritizing. 

Have you thought about turning off your notifications? Yes, thank you, I have. The only notifications I receive are calls or texts. The people who allow notifications from anything else strike me as bent, or just much stronger than I will ever be. I’ve even silenced my phone completely, so that texts only vibrate, which has lead to missing actually important communication, thus strengthening my already substantial paranoia about giving and receiving and missing all types of messages. All networked communication has the seasick whir of the slot machine: the next one could always be big money.  

Perhaps the problem is similar to my email problem: I can’t stand to see any number of unread messages. I have to clear them out. I remember in the third grade when we got mailboxes at school and the utter thrill of discovering I had notes to read. It’s the same feeling, now split across actual physical mail (always junk), personal email (almost always junk), work email (90% junk, 5% need-to-know, and 5% act-on-immediately), and texts (5% junk, 30% unnecessary responses, 54% memes, 10% logistical negotiations, and 1% emergencies). Phone calls are now almost exclusively the arena of situations that need immediate attention. My family has been conditioned by my personality, so that when they call me their first words are “Don’t panic. I’m alright.” They don’t even say hello. In their defense, neither do I. My first words are “What’s wrong?” 

There are doldrums during the week when I don’t get texts, and then I find myself lonely and bored, and I start texting people, just to gin up some conversation. Perhaps the problem is that I don’t get quite enough texts. If I got a little bit more, there would be too many for me to deal with, and my need to liquify that little red bubble would wear down out of exhaustion. I often have the same idea regarding travel. I travel just enough to see how terrible I am at travel. But if I travelled more, then I would streamline. Or I should stop travelling altogether and go in peace. 

Which is what I think of texting. Perhaps I am the old person. Perhaps I am on the cusp of talking trash about someone on a group chat accidentally and hurting people’s feelings. Perhaps my kids should knock my phone out of my hand. I know that I don’t need all this communication to function in the world, but once it’s available, once it becomes a habit of communication, it’s difficult to imagine life without it. It feels like missing out, because it is missing out. The constant parsing of overwhelming noise is the bounty of a full and active life. If it’s too loud, you’re too old.

iPhone Applause

View from the Bandstand

Wherever you go, the phone is there. I was playing a gig at a pool on Memorial Day and someone had their phone in the pool, protected in a specially designed plastic envelope. Even when you’re on the bandstand, the phone is there. Often it’s not yours, but it’s staring back at you, held in the rigid awkward sincere manner of a bar patron attempting to record the live musical performance presently unfolding. This move offends some band members. You’re made to feel even more like a trained animal than usual, which is considerable even under the loosest of performance situations. It happens all the time now, the people formerly known as audience members transformed into cinéma vérité auteurs, a still rock catching the shot on the dancefloor. I can’t imagine the video ever gets shared afterward or even watched again. I think the band is good musically, but rather Warholian in our unfilmability. But perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps someone more attuned would be able to find solace in the various 17-second clips of the band playing over the years, but my life is too short, and besides, I know I’m just standing there. Cirque du Soleil it is not. 

In an attempt to make the best of the unavoidable awkwardness, I’ve come to think of mid-performance phone videoing as a form of applause, an almost helpless gesture of appreciation. There is still conventional applause, to be sure. But there are rituals around when it is deployed. The phone seems to represent a new kind of applause, a spontaneous overflowing of emotion, a way to memorialize in deed if not in fact, a way of saying, “This is worthy of being videoed.” It’s worth being thrown into the algorithmic seas, preserved and shared, forgotten once caught. This non-phone experience is interesting enough that I want to make it a phone experience, too. I want to shine it through my ever-present prism of meaning. It’s with a type of astounded annoyance that we encounter something already outside the phone anyway. We must put it back in.

After the gig, breaking down the gear, a teenager walked up and said, “Good job playing.” Then he walked off. It’s almost always nice to be complimented, even if it doesn’t make any sense. I am the youngest person in that band by thirty years and I am still old enough to be that teenager’s father. I’m hardly accustomed to anyone telling me “good job” about anything, much less a teenager. I mean, we did fine. We played “Under the Boardwalk.” There was talk of playing “Sea Cruise” but it was never called, just one of those set-break notions that drifts by like a cloud. It sounds more like a phrase I would tell my own children after the completion of some chore. “Good job”? I almost expected someone to then walk up and present me with a congratulatory sticker. It’s so hard to keep living and not become a less funny version of Andy Rooney. 

My middle-aged confusion aside, I still appreciated the compliment. However, it should be noted that said teenager never once recorded us with his phone.        

Who’s Zoomin’ Who

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Barely a week into online school and my children have done more video conferencing than I have in my entire life. Though I try not to leer in the background as they fire up another session, I can tell they’re already adept. Heck, they already know to mute their line when not talking. 

At least we have the internet, I thought the other day, while staring at a bird hop blamelessly from branch to branch. That’s the first time I’ve been actively grateful for the internet in ages. I don’t feel comfortable making predictions in any direction regarding what life will be like Afterward. But since adults have complained since time immemorial that what students learned in school wasn’t directly applicable to “real life,” this sudden lurch into online shoestring interconnectivity means that the kids have rapidly surpassed even the most utilitarian parents’ wildest dreams.

Not long ago I remember a school administrator discussing typing skills. He said he felt a little sheepish teaching middle schoolers typing when they would just be speaking into their computers within a couple of years. I was shocked. Surely not. The future is great and everything, but surely the kids cannot surpass typing, my most cherished adult-level skill. 

Typing is almost pure pleasure, the closest physical analogue I have to thinking itself. The only other activity that is nearly thought-adjacent might be walking. But then of course it’s difficult to type while walking, so you have to walk back to the house quickly in order to get those already fleeting thoughts down. Writing by hand is also pleasurable, to be sure, but it’s more physically difficult. And then you are left with such a mess. The almost instantaneous amalgamation of near-coherence that one gets from typing is decadently profound. Even crap drafts look good. And it’s not just the physio-mental activity itself that’s pleasurable. (Apple committed hubris when, in an effort to increase its laptops’ thinness, it introduced the butterfly keyboard, which frequently broke. It made typing — on a laptop! its primary mode of input! — more difficult.) Thinking in written language is fundamentally different than thinking in speech. I don’t want to belabor the idea that writing-thought is stronger than speaking-thought (though it is), but that these are two different skills and lead to different kinds of thought. Literature changed, of course, when the typewriter was introduced and then again when the word processor (still such an odd phrase) was introduced, and it will change yet again when our speech can be instantaneously transcribed. (Cue up ye olde anecdote about Henry James’s late period.) I don’t want to stand across the river of language and yell stop, necessarily, but I do want to recognize the private constructedness baked into the very act of writing prose, as opposed to the performative expectations built into the speech act. Perhaps it’s simply quieter, with all of the epistemological complications. Besides, people who talk aloud to themselves are rightly thought nutso.

I agree there are benefits to all this instant video chatting. My kids can see their teachers and buddies quickly and at scale. For a generation that never really made phone calls, they seem useful. Perhaps this social lacuna we’re experiencing will bring back the old-fashioned phone call, long thought outmoded, but like typing perhaps still useful. I remember phone calls in 8th grade that consisted entirely of me and my interlocutor listening to each other breathe. This was called flirting. 

I was on a video chat the other day and I became distracted by the small pane filled with my face. Is this what people see of me every day? This guy with the giant forehead and pore-ridden nose? Is this how I appear? One benefit of a day without video conferencing is that I go through vast stretches of time without being confronted with the burden of my own face. That’s not to say that I’m not vain, self-conscious, peacockish when given the chance, a gaping wound of ego constantly starved for attention. It’s just that I’m a little less these things when I’m not confronted twice an hour by my own face. 

We’re besotted with faces already anyway. The emotions of entire nations tip on the demeanor communicated by the national equivalent of a conference call. Speaking extemporaneously in an entertaining manner is no way to run a country. And hopefully school won’t devolve into a CNN panel discussion, the teacher just an emcee, a sheep in Wolf Blitzer’s clothing. Prose is a more efficient means of information transmission. It’s more difficult to create. (So much easier just to talk and talk and talk.) But it blesses the reader with perspective, time, and silence. And it weeds out some of the bullshitters. 

I heard my son talking to a computer the other day. “Google Silver Surfer,” he said. 

“Type it in!” I hollered from the other room. “Practice your spelling by typing it in!” 

When I made it around the corner he looked at me like I was crazy.