For whom does the ringtone toll?
THERE’S a new ritual in America of burying the dead with their mobile phones in their coffins, ear-pieces clipped to their unhearing lug holes, so that loved ones can call them.
One sided conversations are nothing new, of course.
Especially when you’ve been married as long as I have.
But this takes unresponsiveness to another level.
Though the chance of a stimulating conversation, I guess, isn’t the point.
This is about clinging to some sort of connection to the dead – and perhaps even the forlorn hope that they’ll suddenly chip in: “It’s really nice sitting up here on a cloud strumming my harp and flapping my feathery wings” – during an era when formal religion has disappeared from many people’s lives.
The same set of desires and fears that caused our distant ancestors to bury their deceased with trappings of their earthly lives has simply found expression through the latest technology.
And yet that same technology threatens to undermine the most precious of all our instincts – true interaction with our friends and families and colleagues.
Forget all this nonsense about “communities” that’s peddled by the purveyors of mobile phones and “social” networking sites.
I’m talking about actually meeting people – looking into their eyes and seeing their souls as well as smelling their breath and putting up with their irritating habits.
Walk down any high street in Birmingham and you’ll see couples walking side by side but holding separate conversations with other people via their mobiles.
Sit in any restaurant in this city and you’re likely to see the same scenario.
Though I’ve got a sneaking sympathy for solo diners who busy themselves sending text messages not because they’ve got anything to say (most people don’t), but because it demonstrates to the staring eyes that they’re not saddoes with no friends, but know someone somewhere.
Not that they ever meet them – they just send endless streams of gibberish, their thumbs working at a blurring rate while their minds plod through the mud of trivia that is modern existence.
I suspect there are relationships and even romances conducted solely by such means.
Indeed, it can’t be long until a bloke will be able to text “sprm” to a function called “ovary” on his girlfriend’s mobile and, nine months later” a ready-nappied “bby” will appear crying on the screen.
And eventually we’ll have a world uncluttered by people and populated by flickering images that will last only as long at the battery allows.
Then, as the last screen fades to black, all those souls lying in their wooden boxes six-foot deep in the ground will wait in vain for the phone call that never comes.
For whom does the ringtone toll?
Us, it seems.
