A
couple of months ago, at Changi International Airport, I saw a stranger crying
in public. I was transiting at Changi on my way back home. So in the meanwhile
thought of photographing those Gong Xi Fa Cai (Chinese New Year) decorations
done all over. And there was hours to go before my next flight, so I was just
going through my FB home page. A girl, maybe 20 years old, was sitting on the couch opposite me, crying into her phone. I heard her say, “I know, I know, I
know” over and over.
What
did she know? Had she done something wrong? Was she being comforted? And then
she said, “Mama, I know,” and the tears came harder.
What
was her mother telling her? That everybody fails? Is it possible that no one
was on the other end of the call, and that the girl was merely rehearsing a
difficult conversation?
“Mama,
I know,” she said, and hung up, placing her phone on her lap.
I
was faced with a choice: I could interject myself into her life, or I could
respect the boundaries between us. Intervening might make her feel worse, or be
inappropriate. But then, it might ease her pain, or be helpful in some
straightforward logistical way. An affluent neighbourhood at the beginning of
the day is not the same as a dangerous one as night is falling. And I was me,
and not someone else. There was a lot of human computing to be done.
It
is harder to intervene than not to, but it is vastly harder to choose to do
either than to retreat into the scrolling up and down my FB home page, or
whatever one’s favourite distraction happens to be. Technology celebrates
connectedness, but encourages retreat. The Facebook didn’t make me avoid the
human connection, but it did make ignoring her easier in that moment, and more
likely, by comfortably encouraging me to forget my choice to do so. My daily
use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely
to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And
our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits.
Everyone
wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if
many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Like someone
wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition,
our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are
becoming increasingly miserly.
Most
of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an
impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the
telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always
home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the
person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute
for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too
burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and
more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements
upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished,
substitutes for it.
But
then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes.
It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person.
Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone
conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news
is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we
began calling when we knew no one would pick up.
Shooting
off an e-mail is easier, still, because one can hide behind the absence of
vocal inflection, and of course there’s no chance of accidentally catching
someone. And texting is even easier, as the expectation for articulateness is
further reduced, and another shell is offered to hide in. Each step “forward”
has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being
present, to convey information rather than humanity.
We
often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved
time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I
worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the farther it gets
from our hearts.
Most
of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in
need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a
kind word or deep empathy.
We
live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory
more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of
others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be
messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we
give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.
