Friday, March 29, 2013

An impertinent pertinent question

A happy family...such alert expressions!
I'm writing this post when I am in Kuala Lumpur but it is just a mere coincidence: I could be looking at similar scenes anywhere else. In any other big Asian city for sure.
Look at them, bent over their screens with a blank expression on their face. How many are they? A lot, too many, almost all of them actually. Gathered around cafe tables, in the subway, at the restaurant. Checking Facebook updates, playing games, chatting, even taking photos of themselves, smiling in front of their same outstretched arm. 
I won't add yet another criticism to an already long list, a new pedantic opinion on this absurd addiction. I'm just asking myself a question: what the fuck were these people doing when these devices didn't exist yet? I don't mean when there were no mobile phones at all, as most of them were still little children back then, but a few years ago, when the expression smart-phone would have sounded like some sort of oxymoron to most of us, when the screens used to be green or gray and the text plain black. When all you could do with a phone was calling or texting someone.
How did those girls that bent on their touchscreens are now updating their virtual profiles, denying my eager eyes the sight of their real ones, spend their time? What topics were those couples who finally have an excuse not to mind each other a moment and remain silent for the whole duration of their dinner talking about? One might think that they have been saved by an electronic gadget just in time, when they were about to fall in the abyss of a monotonous, aimless and dull life. 
Come to think about it, though, it might just as well be better this way. How many stupid conversations don't even start anymore, how many pointless arguments can now be avoided. If smartphones will succeed in reversing the rising worldwide trend of divorce - even by just drastically reducing the time couples dedicate to conversations -, fostering a new baby boom, at least we will be able to say that the global cerebral annihilation of the human race will not have been perpetrated in vain. 
Trading quality for quantity. Provided, of course, that at that stage a thought of this type won't already be too difficult to elaborate.

Update: after re-reading it I noticed that I have expressed yet another pedantic opinion on the matter. A cynical one, as usual. That's it, amen.


A lovely couple...how romantic!
An adventurous photographer, at least he's alone
Shoulder to shoulder
Too busy, both of them
Two friends having such a great fun together!

2 comments:

Matthew said...

Very honest and interesting read Fabio. I am a Malaysian and I've seen this everywhere haha. You're still here on holiday?

Fabio said...

Glad you liked it Matthew!
I'm just exploring different areas before I move to some other country in the region...