Amherst Bulletin – Around and About with Richard McCarthy: Handling our devices: Or, are our devices handling us?

When I was a teenager, among the last things in the world I thought would render me uncool and out-of-it when I got older was technology. In fact, I don’t remember ever using, or even coming across the word “technology,” except my knowing MIT stood for Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a college I was not at all interested in attending. If anyone had tried to tell me that riding the breaking wave of technology would become the — or even a — major criterion for being young and cool, I’d have thought they were talking nonsensically, or as I might have put it, “ragtime .”

Ah, but how very wrong I was. Evidence of that wrongness surrounds and intrudes upon my life every day. Indeed, it was condensed and solidified for me just recently in a few words I overheard a teenager speak when I was sitting in a folding chair, watching a local high school baseball game on a luscious spring day. Next to me, also in folding chairs, was what appeared to be three generations of an extended family. The youngest generation, two girls and a boy of high school age, was sitting closest to me. The high schoolers were talking amongst themselves as if I wasn’t there, which, of course, to them I wasn’t. I considered their obliviousness to my presence to be a fine thing because overhearing things sometimes gives me stories to tell.

At one point, the father of the boy stepped out of earshot to take a picture with his phone of the action on the field. The boy said to the girls, “Look at him. A Millennial with his phone.” He said this in a way young people will when they want to point out the geezerhood of a parent, which way I will describe as “affectionate deprecation.”

Up to that moment, it had never occurred to me that the way someone held their phone reflected their age, that young people who had grown up with their devices had a physical relationship with those devices which spoke of comfortability and confidence, and those to whom the devices came later in life did not, at least in the eyes of the young. I had never really thought about how young people’s phones were integrated into their very being, how they were not so much holding a device as conjoined with it, and how the younger they were, the more dearly held that fusion was. I had never seen that the reason young people have such a hard time putting down their phones is it’s like asking them to shed part of themselves.

The girls chuckled at the boy’s quip, and one of them pointed out that the boy’s father was too old to be a Millennial, and was actually a member of Generation X.

I found myself thinking that if a Generation Xer could elicit such a chuckle, a non-tech-savvy Baby Boomer like me was probably worth a belly laugh.

Carl Sandburg wrote of fog that it “comes on little cat feet.” That’s the way the cumulatively humongous changes computers and the internet have wrought in my lifetime have seemed to come in, with an inexorable and faster and faster paced creeping.

Normally, I write columns that take a minimalist approach to things. I don’t look to write opinion pieces or make explicit broad statements, but rather to bring to the surface what I call “the depth charges of everyday life.” In this instance, however, I’ll offer that while technology has changed so much in my lifetime, it has not changed the heart and soul of things for the better. I don’t think much of a case could be made that humankind aspires more to, or is closer to, “the better angels of our nature” as a result of technology.

I left the game before it was over. When I was alone, my mind’s ear heard a snicker. I call it a snicker, rather than a chuckle, because there was no mirror in it. We thought that the snicker came from Artificial Intelligence, and that the reason for it was the way all of us humans are handling our devices, or, perhaps more accurately, the way our devices are handling us.

I noted there was no affection in Artificial Intelligence’s deprecation of us.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.