The Campfire in Your Hand: Keeping Warm with Your Mobile - David Loftus

Come on, now. Be honest.

How many times have you stared at your palm today? How many hours—total—have you been poking tiny buttons on a hand-held? How many hours have you spent this year on your mobile phone, informing other persons of meaningless information—where you’re walking or driving at that moment, what shows you’ve been watching—as opposed to work-related, life-threatening, or heart-to-heart sharing?

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us,” wrote the Canadian philosopher and futurist Marshall McLuhan. With an irony McLuhan might have appreciated, I’m quoting him without ever having read any of his books. I heard the “tools” quote on a record album that transformed his most famous work, the 1967 bestseller The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, into an aural experience. It wasn’t even the LP itself I heard, but a reel-to-reel tape recording of the disk my Dad had copied from a friend’s record.

If you think you’ve never heard of McLuhan, recall a scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is waiting to get into a movie theater and some pompous jerk is holding forth in line behind him. The man is talking about McLuhan’s theories, and eventually Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, gets irritated he pulls McLuhan himself onto the screen so the media critic and communication theorist can say to the blowhard, “You know nothing of my work.” This apparently was a frequent comment by McLuhan about and to people who criticized his writings. Now he can add me to the list, posthumously.

But back to that toy in your hand. Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, iPod Touches, or whatever you’re carrying have become an integral part of our working world, and like most tools, they invaded our lives and took over well before we assessed the role they play in shaping us. For some, they entered as necessary tools for work—I know many corporations and law firms issued them to then-indifferent employees—but I suspect most people were sucked in by the toy and entertainment aspect: being able to surf the ’net anywhere or anytime, having access to video games without being plugged in at home or having to lug around a laptop.

Anyone can cite the obvious absurdities of other peoples’ (mis-)use of them: the person texting at the wheel while waiting for the red light to change; the couple walking or sitting together but both texting or talking on their cell phones (to other folks, presumably); the kid texting, playing a video game, or maybe even watching a movie on his hand-held while sitting at a live play or concert. My state, Oregon, made it illegal to talk on a cellular phone while driving, but when I leave my apartment, I can easily see roughly a third of the drivers on Portland’s streets yakking to their hand-held. I can also witness their illegal turns, and signal-less lane changes and cornering.

I don’t claim to know any more about Zen than about McLuhan, but it strikes me that our over-dependence on hand-held mobiles may be a symptom of, or at least lead to, a diminution of mindfulness, one of the prime goals of a Zen life. In other words, the more you look at your iPod Touch/BlackBerry/Whozis, the less you put yourself in the present moment … the less aware you are likely to be of what’s coming at you on the sidewalk, the trail, and the road (whether it’s an oncoming car, a greenback, a moment of great beauty, a mountain lion, or an idea of your own).

That’s obvious, you might say: it’s an escape, or at least a distraction. That’s why so many states have banned their use at the wheel. But what sort of escape? Perhaps an escape from more than just the boring, inconsequential, impersonal world around you. Ultimately, it’s an escape from yourself—who you are, right now, at this moment in time and space, in favor of seeing and feeling something another person or company wanted you to see and feel, whether it’s to hear your voice instead of their own thoughts, or to remove another dollar from your pocketbook (or more likely, raise the digits on your next credit card statement or electronic billing).

And may I suggest that perhaps we are so constantly trying to escape ourselves through such toys and distractions because, at bottom, we are mortal? We are dying. And any time we suppress the clatter and flash of cell phone calls, texts, video clips, mobile phone photos . . . sooner or later we’ll recognize that sobering fact. We mustn’t see that. So we clap the hand-held to our ear and stare at it hour by hour, like a mesmerizing campfire in our palm, warming us against the surrounding darkness.