MOBILE PHONES & THE TIME-DEATH APP
INTRODUCTION
Mobile-phones save lives. They are probably the most efficient life-saving device ever invented.
Efficiency = Work Done (Force x Distance) / Time taken.
The owner of a mobile-phone doesn't have to move an inch to call for the emergency services - from a jungle, polar ice-cap or even the city park.
Work-tasks and domestic chores, and all undesired-required tasks, can be speeded up using a mobile-phone. But desired-tasks and pleasure, by definition, involve a process and an experience that no one wants to hurry, interrupt or be distracted from, for that would be turn them into another required task in an endless to-do list. Attention and internalisation are the two highest gifts one human can give to another : they become utterly worthless if interrupted or diluted.
Alas, given the human capacity for volcanic impatience and oceanic indolence, many people do fail to protect their own pleasures: leaving planning until the last minute, and/or over-checking - by mobile-phone/text.
Mobile-phones also murder a moment of attention & internalisation more brutally than any device ever invented. Most users quickly become utterly careless and guilt-free serial-killers. They rarely think what harm this object is doing.
I have written on this theme several times. The first and original piece below, was published in 2002, when mobile-phones and emailing were still considered newish. A couple of unpublished appendices follow.
OUTWRITE
Journal of the
Number
The
Self-Removing Trousers
How
the difference between therapist and patient, in their attitudes towards new
communication technology, affects the therapeutic alliance.
Consider
these stories, some from therapeutic work in a large medical practice in the
Northwest during the mid-to-late nineties, some from the 'real world', whatever
that means.
1)
MY OLD MAN’S A DUSTMAN
A
mousy young man enters. It is my first session with this pre-assessed client, a
trainee accountant. He speaks softly. Very soon I feel this softness is
exaggerated, and probably manipulative. "I found out that my father
is having an affair. I was using the computer at home. I found these letters to
his mistress, he'd deleted them: well, he thought he had. But they weren't
completely deleted. He didn't know that. You can find out."
"Here's
a
At that point I
didn't have a PC. Though now I do, I still don't know how to reconstruct deleted
material. Nor would I want to. On this machine, the facility is called RECYCLE
BIN. How technology sanitises our darker impulses. Compare this clean process
— using keyboard and mouse on a pretty mouse-mat — with the daily life of X,
the famous garbologist. When night falls he visits the backyards of the famous
and the powerful and sifts through their bin-bags: with rat-like tenacity he
seeks among the slimy refuse for any saleable bits of paper, whether
incriminating or just tabloid-tat.
Now
imagine my young man choosing to sift and steal from his own family bins:
getting his hands dirty, having to disinfect the scraps of paper to make them
presentable and then hiding them somewhere else. Isn't this the nadir of
dignity? Why is it less so at the white and shiny PC? Here's an unexpected
answer to the Microsoft Windows advertisement strap-line, "Where do you
want to go today?" "Inside my father's underpants!"
The client described here was clearly troubled by my ordinary questions,
and after the third session he requested changing to a female counsellor. My
guess was that this was stereotypical thinking: a woman will be less probing.
2)
IT’S DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS
"I
thought my boyfriend was having an affair. I broke into his e-mail account. And
he was. He doesn't know I know. You can know when someone is on-line. I've even
used his email to write to her — as if from him."
Again,
I thought that these people are living in a different world from me. I doubt she
thought of herself as 'breaking and entering', or as a 'petty criminal'. I did,
because I grew up with the reference point of these physical images: real
windows and doors broken, and touchable objects taken. I thought of her at her
desk, perhaps even with a laptop on a train or a beach ('You can email from
the beach'- the
Technology
realises, makes real, childhood fantasies - makes magical thinking true. What is
the first line of communication? - umbilical cord and placenta. Then skin, then
milk, then words. And words become the first virtual medium. One learns their
separation from skin. This is another of the lessons Freud's lovely little fort-do
baby is learning. His mother is in the other room: her shape is not
see-able, but sometimes her voice suddenly falls into his ears. The baby adjusts
to loss, but always dreams of reconnection. Even at nine-years-old, Mrs
Gaskell's heroine, Molly Gibson, is still dreaming of being connected to her
father by a string, invisible to others, which she can tug at when she needs
him.
Those who've grown up with the telephone can recapture the wonder of the idea of the phone only by looking at young kids' fascination with toy phones. Until recently all kids will have had a childhood episode when they connected two tin-cans with string and tried to will sound to travel round corners. In these different times most children get mobiles long before they have had to eat the tins of beans and find the string.
3)
PRESENT TENSE
This
next client was such a modern child, at age 22 long familiar with the mobile
phone. She was clever and attractive, a theatre-nurse, certain to do well.
"I've
a big thing about presents, birthday and Christmas. I get very tense. Will I
like what I've been given, by my mother or my boyfriend? Will they like what I
get them? After some months I told my boyfriend how all this gets to me. He was
surprised, but has been very considerate. But still it gets to me. Before we
separated to go home to our families at Christmas, we swapped presents to be
opened on the day. On Christmas morning I rang & texted him first thing,
quite early, to talk about the presents. He said my present was nice. I said his
was all right, too . We didn't talk long."
My first feeling
on hearing this story was of immense pity for her. Then I thought of the
familiar paradox, that the new media, designed to reduce distance in time and
space, should cast such shadows on ordinary human connectivity.
4)
GOOSEBERRY FIELDS FOREVER
This client was a bit older than the others described here: thirty-something, a successful architect, in work and mortgaged. His emotional life had always been manic and a little desperate. Having finally, after several messy attempts, come out of a volatile relationship, he was soon fascinated by another volatile woman. They had been seeing each other a lot, getting on wildly, but both had hesitated about articulating whether these meetings were actual dates and whether they were in some process with coupledom as a possible end. His nerve was beginning to go, and he suddenly seemed very anxious to know how much he was wanted, and in what way.
When next he met her in a work group, he tried the strategy of coolness,
and then was surprised when she suggested, "Come to my room tonight, after
the meeting."
After
a little while he feels so exasperated he announces that he's going. She accepts
this.
It
is the early hours, the deserted, rain-lashed Mancunian streets. He can feel his
head bulging with frustration as he carries home his ignorance of where he
stands. Then he thinks of his mobile phone. His mood lightens as he realises he
can do something, now. He chooses not to ring but to text her: "What's
going on?" Because
she has her phone on, she interrupts her own party to exchange texts. The
conversation is deferred. She rings him the next morning to ask if she can come
over at lunch time to talk. He is more relieved than delighted. But even his
attenuated joy disappears when she turns up with a friend.
As
I am listening to this story, I try to keep in mind that the protagonists are
not gormlessly excitable teenagers.
5
) ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
An Asian man
murders his wife. But he feels invincible, because he has a passport, and he's
just bought a ticket out. He sits on the airport bus gloating with satisfaction
and triumph. But even this is not enough. When the bus stops at Motorway
Services, he goes to a pay-phone, and calls the police. "I've killed my
wife. But Ha! Ha! You won't catch me: I'm flying out." He retakes his seat
feeling fully pleased with himself.
When
the Police arrest him at the airport, he is astonished.
6
) THE DAY HAS A THOUSAND EYES & EARS
The
New Millennium, an ordinary High Street, Saturday morning. As I approach a
thirty-year old woman, I see her take a ringing mobile-phone out of her bag.
Just as I pass her, I hear her say, with an annoyed look and tone "I'm
just going into Woolworth's! Why do you keep ringing to see where I am?"
Is
this a rhetorical question? What is going on? What level of contact would be
enough for her? What level of information would be enough for him? The Greek
Goddess Juno jealously set hundred-eyed
7 ) THROUGH A
CAMERA GLASS DARKLY
A scientific
researcher in his late twenties was 'advised' by his Head of Department to see
me. His multi-national company provided BUPA and brief therapy as part of the
salary package. There was the possibility of his being pre-emptively deported by
the company as a way of avoiding police involvement. He had lent his laptop to
his supervisor who had, accidentally, found a file with images and
film of young women undressing in the company's Residential Training Centre. The
researcher admitted setting up secret cameras to film his girlfriend and a
visiting friend of theirs who was using her room to change for dinner. This
virtual voyeurism was for him a minor pleasure, and do-able because he had the
skills. He hadn't been careful enough to hide the files.
Electronic tagging
arrived years ago. Geek-chic, fashion clothing wired with mobile phones and
cameras, has been on the catwalks, and will be on the High Street one day. Those
newly in love can never see enough of each other: those lovers who are merely
suspicious will be able to see their lovers even more! Compare this with the
beautiful speech from Jane Eyre:
8 ) SHOWING
OFF TO ONE’S THERAPIST
My
client enters. Familiar client behaviour - faffing with coat and jumper, handbag
or briefcase, or the day's grocery-bag. Sits down. Then "Oh I'd better
switch off the phone". Gets out mobile. Fumbles. "It's a new
phone" — nervous, winning smile. Settles into the chair: shows 'ready'
posture and another weaker smile.
Half
of my clients this week have done this. I find it so wearying and annoying. I
think, "Why do you do this right now? Why not in the waiting room? Why
not in the five yards before you enter the building?"
Then, more
spitefully, I think, "Oh you're so important, you must be connected and
open to the Real World out there until the last possible moment before you enter
the strange, detached, floating-world-space of therapy." Then, more
sympathetically, "Oh you poor thing, so terrified of being unconnected
to your little loop of knowledge and gossip, for a whole fifty minutes"
Finally,
the therapeutic thought: "What does it do to both of us, therapist and
patient, knowing that you have shown me that you understand that your mobile
can't be on during the session? Will you resent the rule and resent me? Will I
feel annoyed that you dare to resent me?"
Sometimes
of course the phone goes off, its usually trivial tones piercing the session.
Then, more fumbling and weak apology.
What kind of symbolic-object is the mobile phone when it is in the
outside world, and what is it in the therapeutic space? Imagine a society where
everyone wears trousers with zips-down, and couples at will: the ziplessfuck imagined
by Erica Jong, or simply a kind of doggy-life imagined by Auden. Perhaps
in this strange world there are places where it is required to be zipped up:
imagine them coming in to the therapeutic space, and noisily zipping-up.
Young men and
women cradle their mobiles like permissably showable penises. If the penis is
the male's umbilical cord in and to the outside-womb world, the female's mobile
is finally the longed-for phallus. The client's act of showing the phone being
switched off and put away is a minor sadistic teasing of the therapist: You
can't fuck me!
9 )
A SHORT STORY BY DON DE LILLO
We
may see magical thinking and the hope of sudden wondrous invitations bursting
into the present as being allowable to teenagers, even twenty-somethings. But
when does it become a failure of maturation, to let go of the string? As I was
writing this piece I came across a new short story from Don De Lillo. Two
middle-agers meet in an art gallery; they go to a snack-bar and then drift back
to her flat. Neither feels much desire, though he is somewhat insistent. But his
cellphone rings; he speaks briefly, then sits thoughtfully with the thing in his
hand.
He says,
"I
should remember to turn it off. But I think, if I turn it off, what will I miss?
Something so incredible. The total life-altering call. That's why I respect my
cellphone."
The man is not
aware of what he has said, and the woman does not say, "Well, I'm obviously
not incredible or life-altering enough for you", or, "How about some
respect for me?"
It
is depressing to sense that such an older character, arriving in the therapeutic
space, would be just as pathetic about the phone as a teenager.
COMMENTARY
My
intention is to look at how recent developments in communication technology
alter the experience of the therapeutic space for both the therapist and the
client.
My argument will be grounded
in three premises.
1) THE FACT OF
INSTINCTUAL IMPATIENCE
This
premise unites the elements of a crucial explanatory matrix — time, knowledge,
action and pleasure. One always strives to reduce the time it takes to
acquire the knowledge necessary to perform the action that one
reasons and hopes will bring one pleasure. (The last element includes
relief/cease of anxiety and pain, as well as ordinary joy and self-transcending
release.)
a) Time
It
is said that one's experience of the flow of time is related to the frequency of
thoughts in one's most-frequent conscious waking-state, and that this ability to
think is biologically facilitated by adrenaline. We are all aware of the two
poles of this experience:
i) The few
moments just before losing consciousness in sleep, or the sensation on waking
from the 'just five more minutes
sleep' after switching off the
alarm-clock. As one is on the edge of consciousness, one's adrenaline-level is
low, and thoughts are slow to form. So the sensation that one is having, or has
just had, a few thoughts, prompts one to infer that only a few minutes have
passed. Thus the shock of seeing that an hour has passed!
ii) The other pole
is the time before an accident reaches crisis. Once one's consciousness
registers the possibility of an accident, one's body is flooded with adrenaline,
allowing one to think of all possible avenues of correction or flight. One
becomes aware of an avalanche of thoughts filling one's head, most not
registering. It seems hours or ages have passed. Usually it's barely seconds.
b) Knowledge
How
knowledge contributes to the possibility of conceiving and executing the action
that will bring pleasure determines how the time of the desire and the pleasure
are experienced. Other people are either the object of desire or the source of
knowledge about the objects and persons desired: they may, of course, be both:
Do you love me? One may acquire knowledge in three ways:
i) By mutually
negotiated open exchange: ask direct questions, answer truthfully. This is the
definitive moral means.
ii) By
accident: overhearing, misdirected letters and emails and phone calls. A friend
of mine shared the same initials as his father and brother. Absent-mindedly
opening a letter, his father found out before him that his son was due in court.
iii) By
intentional deceit: invasion and trap, varieties of immorality.
Childhood
fable:
Truth and
Falsehood went swimming together. Falsehood got out early and sneaked off with
Truth's clothes.
Invasion:
Polonius &
Claudius spy on Ophelia.
Trap :
Hamlet feigns
madness: Toby and Maria drop the letter for Malvolio.
c) Action
One either makes
time to act or one makes time to make excuses or even justifications for
not-acting. It is a basic rule in the therapeutic space that the argument from
logistics - I was too busy, couldn't get to a phone/computer/envelope, missed
the bus, car broke down - is disallowed. One must excavate the desire or the
anxiety that inhibited action.
d) Pleasure
The
awareness of ordinary anxiety or of the possibility of ordinary pleasure, and
sometimes the awareness of the possibility of pleasure, prompts anxiety,
produces various levels of adrenaline and of thinking. Part of the pleasure is
created by the reduction in adrenaline and the end of the task of thinking
2
) THE PREVALENCE OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL FALLACY
If
something can be done, it must be done -
without thinking. A corollary of this might be, if something can't be done, one
needn't think about doing it, one can live with it undone. Consider this
illustration from the theatre. While waiting for Hamlet to begin, one
doesn't see a ninety-second collection of snippets from A Midsummer
Night's Dream, The Valkyrie and Run For Your Wife. It can't be done
with live actors, except perhaps in a small repertory theatre. But why bother,
what would be gained? And though a hologram presentation might be possible, it
isn't attempted. Again, it's not considered worth it, and besides, a hologram is
too filmic. But film trailers are do-able, so they are ubiquitous and
inescapable. It is rarely thought that something precious is lost in having such
knowledge.
3 ) THE ECONOMY
OF THE HUMAN HEART
There is what I
call an economy of the human heart. Even the happiest and most fulfilled,
most kindly and likeable people have a limited amount of genuine intellectual
attention and emotional sensibility available for their use each day. They work
with zero-sum accounts. I am inclined to agree with the aesthetician Edgar
Wind's scepticism about the possibility of attending two art exhibitions in two
days. Of course at some level the task or pleasure is do-able. A critic
might have to go to Tate Modem, MOMA and the Uffizi all in a week. A person
might listen to several friends crying or celebrating. And a psychoanalyst might
have an extraordinarily busy week. That's why I say 'genuine'. I am showing my
colours by this!
The
reader might wonder, and quite reasonably, why I didn't begin with the expected
Marxist axiom: Changes in the means of production irrevocably alter social
relations. Or the MacLuhan maxim: The medium is the message, which
ignores Marx's axiom by a sleight of hand. It's not that I disagree with either,
it is simply that I am entering the problem from a different direction.
GOOD
TIME & BAD TIME
Here
is a story I found deliciously shocking in adolescence. I read somewhere, that
from the field of battle Napoleon sent his mistress a letter saying "Home
in five days. Don't wash!" During those five days, he'd be on
horseback, in a coach, on ship.... She'd be swanning between apartments choosing
between velvet and silk.
I don't think I
really understood until, five years later, an older Scottish Lothario to whom I
told this story said, "Oh yes, I like it when a woman is as runny as
brie down there".
Now
imagine Josephine in the age of texting mobiles, Lear jets and power-showers.
Am
I arguing that something more valuable grows in Napoleon and Josephine's
cervical and cerebral cells than in Ivana and Donald Trump's cell-phones? But
what! Aren't I merely showing the envious oldy's spite for the
still-firm-fleshed young,
"You're
getting too much, too soon! You must learn to wait, and enjoy waiting!"
When
I read recently of the teenage Hazlitt walking eight miles to hear Coleridge
speak, and eight miles back, I was impressed and, most strangely, I felt happy
for him. I thought of Pascal's 'rule': Respect means put yourself out! and
of Spinoza's aphorism: All noble things are as difficult as they are rare. It
is crucial to one's maturation to know that one can be arsed to make an effort.
But then not every difficulty endured is either respectful or noble. Vladmir and
Estragon are said to show dignity in their waiting for Godot. The elect in
Purgatory show the most benign form of waiting. It is another maturation marker
that one comes to understand that emotional understanding always lags behind
intellectual understanding - by days if not weeks - and that even then, for the
unified, emotional-intellectual understanding to become a new felt-disposition
will take even longer.
THE
EMOTIONAL HIGHWAY
The
Highway Code introduces us to the concept of thinking-time in the action
of braking. All of us carry a sense of thinking-time for requesting help. Here's
a story:
My
good friend lived within walking distance, but still too far. What does that
mean? My criterion was that whatever I was thinking or daydreaming about when I
began my walk, I would lose the thread before I got to his house: sometimes
several threads. I could cycle, but one thinks differently on a cycle. When he
said he might move to my street, I was delighted. I thought, "Good! He will
be within thinking-distance. I will see him, his kids, and his wife differently.
I will be part of their daily flow, even if I don't see them more frequently. I
will be in their imagination as available within three thoughts - for popping
in, or being called to look after the kids for a few minutes: less time than it
took to get to the old house." Sadly, he got a better house even further
away.
Such
limited-thought, daily-availability of others was ordinary life for most people
for centuries, in the country and even towns, until the advent of utterly
atomised urban life. Perhaps we all carry a family-memory of that rhythm of
availability. Is this why campus and collegiate universities are very popular?
FUTURE-LESS
TIME
One
of the most tragic consequences for a child brought up in the daily, even hourly
crisis and chaos of a dysfunctional family, is that there is no emotional space
to imagine a future. There is just the crisis of the moment; her body and mind
are soaked in adrenaline, she thinks only of how not to be destroyed and how to
get or steal some pleasure. What kind of talisman is the mobile phone to such a
person?
THE
WRONG TROUSERS
In
a time of limited literacy and no telecoms, Shakespeare imagined Rumour as a
many, Hydra-headed monster (Henry IV Part II). If Christ is the Word, the Good
News, the devil is a gossip. And everyone loves gossip, as long as it doesn't
show our dirty linen. But now we live in different times.
"In
the nineteen-thirties Cordell Hull complained of print and radio that a lie went
halfway round the world before truth had time to put its trousers on: nowadays
it has been to Mars and back before anyone is half awake." Harold
Evans, writing in The Times of recent propaganda in the second and third worlds,
adds "[There is] an aura of authenticity provided by technology, by the
internet. [People say] 'He got it from the internet.' They think it's the
Bible. Here in our new magic is a source of much misery."
This is a lovely
quote. It has its roots in the old children's fable about Truth and Falsehood
mentioned above. There are ideas of nakedness, the 'true' penis, magical speed
and power, and ultimate Faustian disappointment.
THE
TASK OF THERAPY
The
title of this essay comes from a perfectly trivial simile by Ben Elton. He has
the doltish Prince Regent say to Blackadder, "I'm as happy as a
Frenchman who has invented a pair of self-removing trousers." Adolescents,
like the Prince, want everything faster than they can imagine it! Some Abbots
won't consider young novices now because, they argue, modern adolescence lasts
till thirty. I think new technology carries the danger of removing the Self
faster than one can tell.
New technology
allows one not to be alone in-this-room-now; it allows one to be 'with'
others, but not in the same space, in-this-room-now. It allows one to hurry
others to respond; it hurries one's own thoughts faster than the psyche can
understand and the heart can feel. Is the use of telecommunications mostly the
Kleinian manic defence against an inability to be alone, against becoming the fort-da
baby with a broken thread, the cotton reel flying into space - the next room
- like a lost spaceship?
Is
it the task of therapy to enable the client to think slowly, to reduce
adrenaline levels, to be able to be alone, to be in the same space as others, to
live with waiting for others, to live with uncertainty?
Anti-gun
lobbyists plead, 'Give up your guns.' Should therapists recommend abstinence
from mobiles? Should they ask their Receptionists to say to clients 'Leave
your mobiles in Reception.' (On the wall of the Interview Room in the
Citizen's Advice Bureau there is a sign: "If your mobile phone goes off,
you will be asked to leave!") What kind of nakedness would the client
feel then? Who'd be wearing the trousers then!
END of Original Printed Essay
***************************************************************
APPENDIX 1 :
Spring 2003 : FURCOFF
EESAKE
The
Self-Removing Trousers was
written late Summer 2002, and published February 2003. Given that its subject is
technology, it is obvious that further advances in telecoms will offer different
examples of the pathological use of telecoms in human communication. I’d argue
that these newer examples support my basic theses.
1
: NO WRONG WORD
Technological
Fallacies
TF1
: If it can be done, it must be done.
TF2
: If I can do it, it can’t be wrong.
TF3
: Even if new telecoms are ambiguous or
inefficient, they must be preferred to old telecoms and even old coms.
A patient tells me that
text messages are constrained by character-limits, so he has to not only use
text-vocabulary, but sometimes he uses the wrong word because it’s shorter. I
think this is more about instinctual impatience than his finances. When I
suggest what to me is bleeding obvious – send two messages – he replies
wearily that this sometimes means that the second message appears at the
recipient’s end before the first. (Of course, the telecoms companies
deliberately impose these constraints : profit is more important than true
communication.) So even though he knows this telecom device has great capacity
to confuse his communication, he won’t wait to phone-live or email or write a
letter. The minor but frequent horror is hitting the Send-button before checking
that the Reply-button, which was also hit with adolescent impatience a few
seconds earlier, is for the correct recipient.
Perhaps the task of finding
an envelope or stamp might actually give the adolescent sufficient pause for
thought.
It was very rare to write
one’s reply on the sender’s letter and send that back.
2
: THE RIGHT PICTURE
Everyone
understands, don’t they, that “Would
you like to come in for a coffee?” spoken
at the end of a date, by either datee, means “I’m
inviting you to the next stage of relationship” or,
in plain speech, “This could be your
lucky night”. Very few people
have the sublime confidence of Rod Stewart, to say honestly :
“If
you want my body,
And
you think I’m sexy,
Come
on sugar, let me know.”
A
recent television advert shows a girl saying goodbye to her date on her
doorstep, and then immediately wishing she’d SAID something else. As she is
making coffee for herself, she sees her mobile, and decides to send him a
picture-message of the cup of coffee. We then see the soon-to-be-lucky boy, who
is halfway down the street, stop,
puzzle, perk-up at the picture and bound across the road.
It
is a developmental marker to know the different times & places for the uses
of words & images in human communication. Is there a secular morally grand
version of this old plea “Oh Lord I am
not worthy, but speak the word
only”
3
: DANGEROUS WRITING
My
point is not a mere reactionary rant against new telecoms. One ordinary difficulty is that one might not have had sufficient
time, physical time but also emotional
time to process the information one has just got (opened/noted), before more
arrives. Of course one might read all the words of the second or fifth message,
and one might be bright enough to formulate apt and even witty replies to each.
But something is lost in the relationship with the sender if one gives their
words only minimum time & emotional digestion
The
other great danger is that telecoms allows the legal gathering, and sometimes
illegal gathering, of information and then its misuse – illegal and or/
immoral. Message-phones and video-phones will also increase the scope for
snooping and cheating on people that one more publicly declares that one deeply
respects and loves.
APPENDIX 2 : Summer 2007 :
MOBY TRICK
Consider
these four remarks
1: “Everything is what it is and not another thing”
2: “Everything
leaves its mark on something else.”
3: “The
wheel is an extension of the foot.”
4: “Wot
are you loik!”
This is the familiar
philosophical puzzle of uniqueness and similarity. The first remark by Bishop
Butler was cherished by Moore & Wittgenstein. Grissom, the
a) What is it like?
b) What does it extend?
But first here is a joke
from the 1970s.
Walking
down the street, a man bumps into an old friend who is carrying two huge
shoulder-bags, the size of suitcases.
“Let
me put these down”. He does. “How are you?”
“Fine.
Been shopping?”
“Oh
yeh. I’ve got this fantastic new watch.” He rolls up his jacket to show it.
The strap is plain but it holds in place a 4square- inch LCD screen. He smiles
proudly.
He
wearily picks up the two huge boxes.
“What’s
in them crates?!”
“The
batteries.”
I heard it around the time
digital watches first appeared. The joke-maker beautifully extrapolates from the
mere-time watch of his day to a multi-tasking item. Alas, the joke doesn’t
work today, for technology has produced the tiny long-life battery. And, as we
all know, technology has also produced that fantasy multi-tasking object, the
mobile-phone aka moby.
In this Appendix to the
above essay, I wish to focus on what might be called
1:
MOBY AS JEWELLERY
/engagement ring
The moby is, after the
ring/necklace, often the most financially expensive thing a person is carrying
(wearing). They treat it with the care and anxiety appropriate to the
superlative.
2:
MOBY AS DIARY/ADDRESS BOOK/LOVE-LETTER
People are very careful to
find suitable & hideable containers for their private information
– formal details about themselves & people they hold dear: and
informal, deeply personal thoughts – some to be seen by no other, and some
which are part of an exchange of intimacies. The three objects named above
perform these functions : and so have the highest ‘information worth’, as
distinguishable from economic worth, of any object they may be carrying.
(If a person’s address
contains the details of their stockbroker or drug baron, then it clearly has the
highest financial value as well). These special containing-objects are guarded
well, and revealed slowly. To lose them – or even the thought of having left
one’s diary open to view - induces high anxiety instantly, even terror.
Given its recording
capabilities the moby comes to be used as the containers above. People won’t
leave it near someone they don’t trust.
3
: MOBY AS LIFEBUOY
A lifebuoy is an object
(made, in fact, of a million straws) that will keep afloat a drowning person. It
is the first hope of rescue from extreme danger. Then one might paddle to shore
or be picked up by a helicopter. When one feels stranded in the ocean-of-life,
one naturally hopes for rescue. The moby is given to teenagers as a
rescue-requesting object. As children are often unrealistically daring, the gift
is more to reassure the parents.
What level of danger to
children exists in society is a perennial topic of discussion. At the least, one
can say that, except for the unfortunates in dire poverty or rich dysfunctional
families, ordinary life contains very, very few possibilities of drowning: and
some dealing with danger is necessary for maturation.
4:
MOBY AS GUN
A gun is a warning to
others that you have the capacity to seriously harm or even kill them. The other
may be innocent, in which case you are displaying a desire and power to harm
& humiliate: “I shot a man in
If the other person was the
first to signal to you a threat, of any kind, then in this extreme danger, your
gun is your first hope of defence/escape (self-rescue). Here we have the gun as
lifebuoy! Again one must say that
extraordinary danger – requiring guns - is rare, but the state/church can
generate a false impression. In the midst of the annual wailing over the annual
school massacres in the
The moby can be used to
display the power to harm and humiliate: by
the garnering of film-footage showing happy-slapping or bodily functions or
sexual indiscretions, and by bullying & menacing text messages and emails.
Here is a desire to kill confidence and reputations!
5:
MOBY AS PENIS/DOLLY/COMFORT-CLOTH
It is maturational task for
infants and geriatrics to know how to self-soothe, to alleviate anxiety and to
enliven oneself :“You gotta lively up
yourself.”
[Bob Marley].
Parts of one’s own body or other objects may be used. In the privacy of their
home, some grown men like to sit with their hands down their pants, cradling
their penis. Women might hug a cuddly toy. This is obviously physical
(libidinous) but rarely aiming at sexual discharge and exchange.
It is common to see men and
women, cradling, patting, and stroking their moby in this way, in public! I
guess a vibrating pager/moby has a different resonance for women than men.
6:
MOBY AS INVISIBILITY SHIELD/RING
Young children
have invisible friends. Later they read, in the classics and in fairy stories,
of objects that can make a person invisible: allowing them to interact unseen
with an individual or a group. A famous example is the ring of Gyges in Plato.
Even grown-ups day-dream of such an invisibilising object
that would allow their Pleasure Principle to go prancing through the
world.
Some moby-owners, when in a
group, seem to act as if the ring-tone and their taking the call has made them
invisible/inaudible: they can withdraw from the group conversation, but still
remain in the group-space. It is rare for people to leave the group. Often the
group-conversation is significantly disrupted. Occasionally the call-taker gets
the others to shout ‘hello’ to the caller, as a way of being accepted back
into the group.
7: MOBY AS TIME-LORD’S
DIAL
Moby holders, like the man
in the short-story quoted above in my original essay, fantasise about the
wonder-call offering the unearthly pleasure. At a more mundane level, some even
defer deciding between ordinary joys until the last possible minute – which in
the permanent now of moby-space – can be whenever one chooses to make the
call. As they desperately wait for GoodOh!, they manage to be late more often
than in fixed-phone days.
8:
MOBY AS PASSIVE SMOKE
Passive smoke refers to the
unintended, undesired and actually harmful sharing of (the residue of) someone
else’s pleasure – your smoke is also going into my lungs, hair and clothes.
Though the danger of smoke was scientifically established in the 1930s, by the
Nazis, it did not start becoming part of social policy until the 1970s:
and the legal bans on smoking in public facilities were not enforced
until the following century. For most of the past century smokers assumed it was
all right, their right, to light up anywhere anytime. To a non-smoker like me,
the occasional polite question “Do you
mind if I smoke?” never felt
real: because one knew most smokers are only ever one-missing-fag away from
getting unbearably ratty.
Moby ring-tones and the
half-heard-half of moby chat feel like aural smoke that soon chokes one’s
heart and mind. Just as in the assumed
In the charming song People
Like Us David Byrne remembers his childhood in the
People like us
Are
gonna make it because
We
don’t want freedom
We
don’t want justice
We
just want someone to love.
This affirms ordinary
(familial) love as the highest human value. The various verses offer criteria,
one of which intrigued me when I heard it:
People like us
Who will answer the
telephone
There is the ordinary
goodwill of doing the secretarial duty of picking up the phone. But I wondered
if he also meant another layer of goodwill. In
England
most people of those times who had phones had
them in the hall, which was often unheated. So it was a kindness to leave the
warm sitting-room to answer the family-phone.
The advent of the
(individual) moby has made such kindnesses obsolete.
People like us
Who
don’t answer the mobyphone.
because they don’t want
to disrupt the group conversation.
9: MOBY AS UNKICKABLE
PRICK
God
floors the scoffing, Christian-persecuting, Jew, Saul, and says :
“Saul,
I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the
pricks.”
He takes this call, in all
its senses, and converts, becoming Paul a fierce kicker of women and gays.
Mark Twain’s great novel
begins:
"TOM!"
No
answer.
"TOM!"
No
answer.
"What's
gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"
No
answer.
He doesn’t take the call.
Hearing
one’s name called out, especially in a public space, instantly produces a
complex emotion. One learns from early childhood onwards that it is spoken in
many different ways, which produce a variety of emotions. But there is a primal
response to respond, to not-ignore, when one’s name is called.
The
individual moby’s personal
ring-tone is a kind of calling one’s name out. I’ve rarely seen a moby-owner,
who has decided not to take the call, also refrain from looking at who’s
calling. Even as they are switching it off, they sneak a look, they nod, and so
further vanish from the conversation they were just having with you. They are
clearly anxious to know the name of the person who was calling their name. They
begin to imagine replying very soon and they begin to formulate the reply.
10 : MOBY AS ORWELLIAN INTERRUPTION
Perhaps
this is the secular version of the holy call. Big Brother might appear on-screen
in one’s lounge or bedroom at any time and call one’s name. This is the
State letting the citizen know that he/she can’t step beyond its eye or sway,
can’t take their pleasures freely in an elsewhere.
The
moby allows each person in a group, a family, to be such an interrupter.
Nothing, no action, no pleasure, is held to be sacrosanct, nothing you do is
not-interruptible.
One senses a refusal by the other person to protect one’s pleasure, and the
afterglow of that pleasure. The subject-matter of the call has the veneer of
urgency, but it in truth is nothing such. It is rare for ordinary family life
with its ordinary ups and downs to arrive at extreme danger requiring rescue
within a few minutes. What the call is really saying is
“You’ve had enough fun. I’m
stopping it now.”
AN EXPLANATION
I
could have put this section at the beginning of the Postscript but I wanted the
Reader to reflect on the examples in their own way first. My suggestion is that
the following simple psychological mechanism is in operation. Here is a line of
argument.
1:
The (personal) meaning of an object is given by the complex (matrix) of affects
it induces/contains: both those consciously apprehended and those unconsciously
apprehended. A simple example – just reflect what a breast means. One is so
overwhelmed by the seemingly boundless aggregate of affects, one seeks an
analogy from physics: any non-human piece of matter – well the human body too!
– is the potential site of an imaginable volume of energy E=MC2. The naming of
the apprehensions must have a social base (contra the private language argument)
even if any individual mints personal nuances to such names.
2:
At any given moment there is an established complex of affect attached to all
known objects. There is some affect that is released by but not quite bound by
that ‘old’ object.
3: A
new object is apprehended. One tries to place it in its similarities and
differences to already known objects. Among the apprehensions is of the new
object as a possible container for the residue of affect attached to an old
object.
4:
The new object also induces a new nuance of established affect. This must be or
else there really would be nothing new under the sun!
5:
The present value of an object (new or old) is given by its ability to contain
one’s instinctual impatience. It involves learning how objects (even other
people as ‘objects’) facilitate, frustrate or exacerbate instinctual
impatience.
6:
Maturation is indicated by one’s capacity to master instinctual impatience.
This is not mere self-denial. It is a mean between the pathologically disturbed
positions of inhibitionism and exhibitionism.
7:
The learning must involve understanding how necessary
are waiting and boredom: and that it is possible to be overstimulated (too-many
after-school activities) and thereby, paradoxically, retard instinctual mastery.
8:
One must regularly remind and renegotiate those in one’s moby-loop that
emergencies are very rare, that other people’s pleasures (and importantly
after-pleasures) must not be interrupted: that one must deal with one’s
impatience for at least a part-day, six hours : morning, afternoon, evening,
night..
AD HOMINEM
I do
believe mobile phones have their excellences: they are the best lifebuoys to
date. I am not a Gandhian or hippy Luddite. I have chosen not to have one, for
the same spectrum of reasons that I don’t watch film-trailers – that I feel
they exacerbate instinctual impatience. My sociological observation is that most
people use them most of the time in such a way as to weaken the necessary human
project of mastering instinctual impatience. The extra information
gathered by the relentless use of the moby and the time
saved by not having to find landlines, hasn’t produced kinder, more empathetic
people. Reader, perhaps it has for
you.
TALKING ABOUT MY INSTALLATION
I
would take one each of the symbolic objects above, place them in a cunning
gestalt and call it ‘Moby Trick’ : and see if the visitors to the gallery
got it.
=================================================================================================================================================
APPENDIX 3 : FEBRUARY 2018
NON-SCREEN-TASKS as AN UNBEARABLE INTERRUPTION OF SCREEN-CHECKING
When I was a child,1960s, the three quietest places in the city, in the community, were the Public Library, any Church, and the Snooker Club. The people who ran these places recognised a deep human need for experiences of silence, and of being with others in a shared experience of silence, either doing something together, or watching others. The silence was also an experience of freedom from the burden of talking and listening : of not being obliged to talk, to explain oneself or to listen to other people talking to no necessary purpose or charm right now. You would watch your friend perform his/her snooker-shot. He/she would watch you do your shot. You both paid attention during your conversation, doing nothing else at the same time : except perhaps eat & drink.
Today, at any social gathering, almost everyone has their phone on and in-hand or on-the-table : the pub, the restaurant, the church, the library, even the snooker-hall. People, kids and the elderly, only half-listen to the speaker, who may also be screen-checking as they speak. They find it impossible - even in the midst of their playtimehours - to leave their phone unchecked for even ten minutes.
I sense that they would feel genuinely distressed if they were prevented from checking : even when they know that there is no reasonable chance of an emergency among their loved ones happening in the next two hours or certainly the next ten minutes if they have just checked : and that cute pictures of cats or videos of goals and celebrity nudity will still be there in 90 minutes when they are home alone. Quite often I see them check their phones while their friend is making their snooker-shot. A former champion of the Palio in Sienna remarked that the young man he was training, in 2015, was forever checking his phone as soon as he came off the horse : it being obvious that he was thinking too much of his desire to check his phone even while he was on the horse. There was no fallow-time during which he reflected on the riding exercise he'd just done. I've seen good players practising snooker with one hand holding their phone. A trainee vicar told me in 2015 of church meetings where everyone's phone is on and people text comments throughout the service and discussions. In news footage inside a French cathedral, of the congregants attending the funerals of their 'loved' ones murdered by terrorists, I saw middle-aged women checking their phones.
Twenty years ago I met a judge-theologian who had been part of the Truth and Reconciliation Council in South Africa. In one of his books he insisted that the Christian message can be seen as emphasising two dispositions : not-to-kill and a bias to the poor. This is of course admirable. But a crucial injunction from Christ is missing : You cannot serve both God and Mammon. He pitied the arrogant stupidity more than the sinfulness of those who thought they could.
What is easily forgotten is that Mammon will say - You can! The fundamental capitalist principle is that you can have everything simultaneously : so work even harder - or cheat others even harder with zero-hours contracts, faulty goods and lies - in order to get everything which can be bought and had simultaneously and you won't have to choose or wait : and perhaps not even share with others. Kierkegaard famously said "If you marry a woman for her money, you are marrying only the money." Similarly if you bet on a sports-game that you are watching, you are in danger of losing more than your money. A few weeks ago it was said on the News that nine million people in the UK report feeling lonely. The tv-adverts for the gaming-site Tombola show average men and women, mostly aged 25-50, organising day-outs to the countryside on trains and or to the beach, always with plenty of food and drink, and also various additional group activities such as fishing, dancing, lantern-making etc. If all, or even most, of the people proceed with ordinary attention and goodwill, that will be enough for all to have a memorably enjoyable shared experience. But into the visual frames of the advert are inserted holograms of bingo-cards and shots of people gambling merrily on their mobile phones : trying to persuade viewers that these activities will significantly add to your pleasures.
I grew up knowing lots of adult smokers who would say clumsily to their kids "Don't smoke!". It rarely helped. Consider these cartoons from the past two years.
Addictive behaviour can corrupt a person of any age who is - and this is the grim paradox - unable, for whatever psychopathological cause, to to protect a range of pleasures for themselves, both solitary and shared: the latter being ruined for others too.
The sane & socialist (and spiritual) principle is that certain experiences can't be had simultaneously : some, like fallowing and meditation and worship and prayer, must be done on their own (alone or with other-sharers) and can't be rushed. Even talking or playing snooker or dancing with your friend in a kind and emotionally fruitful way can't be done while paying attention - via the screen - to people who are not with you right now, and who you might not even know personally.
You might think you are successfully doing both - playing or praying and screen-checking - that you are having double pleasures : but in reality you are having neither, not even half-each. Even screen checkers begin to sense the insufficiency and emptiness of such 'social' evenings : but after a while they are too too addicted to stop, or too frightened of other addicts to challenge them and to suggest negotiating 'old-style' screen-less shared pleasures for a whole evening or morning or day.
For centuries, and even in some places today, stewards outside churches & temples prevented women with bare arms entering. Just for a second, imagine stewards outside churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, socialist-feminist meetings, philosophy seminars.... refusing entrance unless all screens were placed in the cloakroom before going into the 'good space'.
It's never going to happen. But don't wonder why!
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EXTERNAL APPENDIX
Reader, how many essays or articles about this topic have you read? Of those, how many shaped your thinking and personal habits and what good you tried to teach your children.
(Please can you send me the references.)
My first brief essay The Self Removing Trousers was written in 2002, sixteen years ago! Many years after I'd written it, I came across a book with an even briefer essay by Umberto Eco written in 1991. It is the only essay on the topic that has impressed me. .
Several episodes of the US tv procedural Law and Order Special Victims Unit on these themes have been a brilliant fusion of the dramatic and the pedagogic.
Look, learn and weep!
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MORE OF OTHERS : ON TEMPTATION & PLEASURE
Here is Adam Mars-Jones, one of the very few illuminating literary critics alive, writing August 2018, in the LRB, on a historical novel.
Since it is both
nourished by the vogue for Claude Cahun and feeds back into it, acknowledging
the contributions of the leading researcher in the field, Never Anyone But You
risks seeming like the narrative arm of an art historical enterprise, rather
than a novel with its own power source. The difficulty of reading it
innocently, without reference to the status of its central figure, is part of a
more general difficulty faced by fiction in the information age. Novels set
in the past now compete with the historical record in a way that has no
precedent. Until recently amateur historians would be likely to have
reservations (and professional ones would never be satisfied) but the common
reader would happily skate over any amount of loose handling. The two ways of
writing about the past weren’t expected to converge, but now books claiming to
be non-fictional enter people’s heads as a matter of course, and fiction has
to adapt in its turn. This isn’t anything as simple as a raising of standards
in historical fiction but a shift in the definitions. Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth
Queen novels, for instance, weren’t expected to withstand scrutiny in the way
that Philippa Gregory’s books claim for themselves (to say nothing of Hilary
Mantel): in fact the degree of waywardness on offer, the blur of Fordian
impressionism, was the whole appeal of those books. When L.H. Myers set an
immense tetralogy in the time of the Mughal Empire (The Near and the Far,
1929-40) it wasn’t because he was an expert on the period, but because it
offered him a blank canvas on which to develop the themes that preoccupied him.
One of the attractions for Gore Vidal of Julian the Apostate as the subject of a
novel was the slenderness of the documentary evidence as late as the 1960s.
Sverich, a hapless but harmless village fool finds a lame rabbit in the road. He binds its twisted leg with dandelion stalks and is about to set it in the corn field, when the rabbit speaks: "I am a magical rabbit, of the kind you will have read about in childhood: and I offer you two wishes.
Without a pause, Sverich says "I'd like a magical glass of beer : such that, after I have finished drinking, the glass refills: and again, and again for ever."
Without a pause, the full glass is in his hand. Sverich drains it, and it magically refills. He laughs triumphantly.
The good rabbit smiles and says "What is your second wish?"
Sverich says " I'll have another one of these magical glasses. "
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