The Globe Theatre, London. 2012. That is where and when the ubiquity and power of the smartphone really dawned on me.
It was at a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Our little party was seated a couple of levels up from the floor and I was thus able to look down at the stage and the pit area around it where, in a tradition going back hundreds of years, a crowd of several hundred groundlings stood to watch the performance.
Images: Both images featured are from Shutterstock.
I should mention, by the way, that The Globe, a facsimile of the original structure of Shakespeare’s time, is open to the sky. Not least, this makes sense of the Prologue to the play:
O for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention:
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act.
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
And a few lines later:
Can this cockpit hold
The vast fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did afright the air at Agincourt?
You better believe it! “This wooden O” became the world that Shakespeare conjured. And, okay, the story may be a tad propagandist towards the Tudor dynasty, but some of the language is utterly sublime.
On that day, around the time that there was an interval in the play, the ‘open top’ theatre meant we all knew that dusk was falling - which emphasized the blaze of light that suddenly illumined the pit area. It really was quite startling.
What had happened, of course, was simply that, with the break in the play, the members of the audience reached for their smartphones and, from my high vantage point, I could see them all start busily scrolling, tapping, searching.
Put that another way: they had left one world, that which is populated with flesh and blood people, and gone straight to an online world. Now, I know, I know, a few of them were probably checking that the dog had been taken for a walk, or that their meal would be ready when they got home, but a lot, I’m sure, were … well … scrolling, tapping, searching.
And that’s the world that we have now all long-since become accustomed to. But it’s a world where all is not well. Literally.
Last week I picked up on a newspaper article that declared we’re far less happy than we once were, and children are the least happy of all. Twenty-four hours later there was news of a new book from Jonathan Haidt: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Now, a week later, I have a copy and I shall refer to it in upcoming posts but, as yet, I need some time to absorb all of its contents.
However, just to start the ball rolling, the phenomenon I describe with the Globe example above is what Haidt refers to as a shift from embodied to disembodied, and synchronous to asynchronous communication. And, yes, with particular reference to children, he makes the point that this shift underpins a truly momentous and damaging shift in human behavior.
Homo sapiens is a hugely clever and successful species. And yet it took us a very long time to learn how to intuit, understand and measure our impact on Nature and the planet.
But there is another aspect. Us, ourselves, internally. Now, it seems, we are also falling short in our understanding of Human Nature itself. By unthinkingly attempting to override millennia of largely internalized experience and learning about some absolutely fundamental aspects of our development we may, ourselves, be becoming the greatest risk to the survival of our species.
More to come, soon!
Do, please, feel free to join the conversation.
"Now, it seems, we are also falling short in our understanding of Human Nature itself."
Yes, it seems we are ... at least on a collective level, although Haidt is doing heroic work. In our defence, I've come to think that understanding human nature is the most difficult task of them all. If our brains were simple enough that we could understand ourselves, we wouldn't be capable of understanding ourselves. A human is an exceptionally complex entity! And if they band together and make societies ... permutations beyond imagination! But, yet ... the human heart seems strangely constant down through history. This is why literature is so invaluable for our understanding of ourselves. Our technology grows in complexity, but our feelings and foibles, our motivations and fears seem recognizable -- if one has the ability to recognize such things at all ... which is perhaps where our societies are derailing these days.
A step back (and inwards): I realize that my life, my way of living, is unusual in our times. I earn my keep as a woodworker, working in seclusion each day. I work for a few hours, I read, I listen to music, I am still. I am poor (relatively, for Norway) and lead a frugal life. I have no wife, no children and no 'smart' phone. What I do have is an abundance of time. I do not need to work many hours each day in order to sustain my 'lifestyle'. My goal is to lead a satisfying life with simple means. I'm both blessed and cursed with an active mind. On the one hand I can amuse myself by just sitting on a chair thinking about things, creating stories, images, fantasy worlds or (a perennial favourite): 'My Dream Workshop' -- in short: Castles in Spain.
I sometimes think that as a consequence of my slow-paced, solitary life, my mind is 'uncluttered'. I have the time to think things through, deal with my feelings and make my mind up. When I have dealings with other, 'normal' people, they often seem distracted, stressed and scatterbrained. Many seem unable to reach any meaningful conclusion to a train of thought or to a topic of discussion, they are just blown off course by the slightest impulse. They are easily distracted, like children. I often feel like an adult talking to a child, returning the conversation to the question / topic that needs deciding after the butterfly-brained baby has flittered off, drawn to yet another shiny object or a gadget that goes biiip! biiip!
The downside to this is that I often 'see' other people in greater detail than I might have wished. When my mind is still, I can see and listen attentively, with my feelings open and impressionable. Some people are a joy to meet and this is one of life's true gifts! Others are ... not good. It seems to me that people are increasingly angry, judgemental and perverse. So little kindness! So little patience! So little virtue ... who speaks of virtue these days? Fools like me, I guess.
Off on a tangent -- that's where you'll find me!