One of the pleasures of living in our neighborhood is the ability to travel back and forth to work on Muni- a pleasant walk, downhill, and then the light rail to downtown. ‘Serendipity’ would apply here, too, as even I get the occasional, shall we say, admiring glance from someone on the train with whom, under other circumstances I might plight my troth- for a few minutes, anyway. (Let’s see if Keith McCullar reads this post) Muni also keeps me abreast of social phenomena, lost as I am for most of the day in my own thoughts, with proximity to others, and the adverts on the train, begging for my attention. Jostling from the other passengers does that, too, and the frequency of it reminds me that all cultures and ethnicities have different spatial orientations. Interestingly, as frequently as I rode the Tube while living in London, I don’t think cumulatively I had elbows, backpacks, and other extensions of humanity in such immediate proximity as I do in any given day riding Muni. While I’ve long ago written complaining of the size of backpacks, wondering what on earth people on their way to work, and ostensibly not on their way to begin a 7 day hike in the Sierras, could possibly have that they find it impossible to do without during the course of the working day. But what’s augmented all this, and I notice it more each day, are the arms and elbows raised while people are- wait for it- texting. This is not a new phenomenon, as technologies go, being a few years old. But with the applications available on any number of smart phones- none of which I possess- the ease with which people can do stuff that they didn’t previously realize they even needed to do makes enclosed spaces, consequently, a forest of arms and elbows akimbo. I never cease to wonder what deathless message or imperative tasks people are performing, beyond the obvious one of gouging each other in the ribs.
Given the brevity of text messages and the visual message of the application icon, it’s little wonder that bookstores are in peril. People don’t read, or at least, not typically more than a 140 character Tweet. That said, I don’t really know that the result of iPhones and text messages literacy will go the way of the buggy whip. Human culture as human cognition is dynamic, and while at any given time, there may be typical yardsticks, there’s never a static, immutable norm. I consider myself literate and learned in the humanities, but my Latin’s pretty rusty. By some fairly typical measures of, say, a century ago, I would hardly be considered literate, much less learned.
The preference for either a brief message or just to look at the pictures is hardly new, and since we all know the picture/1,000 word aphorism, I can then immediately suggest that it is largely so many 20th century critics that have sought, through criticism, to transform paintings and other artworks into other (printed) media- with very limited success. Moreover, artworks should compel action, just like a computer icon or iPhone app, and it was the mindfulness of a compulsion to buy that made, for artists, the placement of their paintings in 19th century salons so fiercely competitive.
So the iPhone and its concomitant features are here, and are okay- but what to do about the incessant poking in the ribs?