Smartphones distract from reality

By Chris Kelly

It's annoying, but I find myself doing it. No, it's not sleeping through the alarm clock or spilling instant oatmeal on my shirt in the morning. It's that filler between classes, that substitute for silence.

Old friends and fresh faces are not the only things that I have seen over the first few weeks back at school.

As far as I am concerned, iPhones and other products of the like are now cooler than neon spandex was in the 1980s or Kanye West's music is to the current white middle class. I do not personally own an iPhone or Blackberry, but that does not keep me from participating in useless phone conversations in order to kill time. With or without high-tech cell phones, students, professors, maintenance workers, confused visitors to the Santa Clara campus and, yes, the rest of the world, are changing the way we think about free time.

A college campus is the perfect location to witness firsthand how modern society is slowly eliminating what we often define as peacefulness, only to replace it with unnecessary, superficial conversation and web surfing.

How often do you overhear someone on the phone orating something along the lines of "O hey, watcha doin? Nothing? O, me either," while you, by yourself, are walking to class? Tranquility, apparently, has lost its stock value, while looking like Ari Gold from Entourage and keeping extremely busy has broken the glass ceiling of coolness.

While normal texts and conversations are socially acceptable, tethered technologies, such as the Blackberry and iPhone, are the power tools that are constructing the barrier between ourselves and the traditional daily events to which we are accustomed, such as face to face conversation and, more importantly, paying attention to our professors in class instead of the YouTube shenanigans playing on our hand-held screens.

According to Apple, over 16 million Americans owned an iPod as of last June. I cannot imagine that the Blackberry is very far behind, and I can guarantee that Santa Clara University represents a couple thousand of those in active use and another couple hundred that are now broken from using them incidentally as coasters, bottle openers and napkins. In any case, they are being used as much as 15-cent ramen packets are used in my kitchen.

The infatuation with these phones is not difficult to understand. There are certain tools and games that are simply addictive. How about those crafty widgets? They are the solution to avoiding that moral obligation we call responsibility or using that difficult thing we call a memory. Can't spell? No problem. Don't want a real hamster? Put a digital one on your phone, name him Lemmingwinks and feed him when you feel like it; he will not die if your phone runs out of battery.

Maybe, if we are lucky, we will whimsically fall back into the Dark Ages and barbarians will come burn all our books and sack our cities while we drink mead and reinvent the feudal system.

There are, however, plenty of advantages to these dangerous technologies. For example, the new Apple "bump widget," which allows you to physically bump your iPhone against another iPhone and exchange contact information.

So next time you are walking by yourself to the library, instead of screaming out "my friend likes you!" when you see that beautiful girl carrying an iPhone, you can just bump into her and say "Oh, hey, look at that, I got your number, we might as well make this work."

My personal favorite widget was created by Jordan Palmer (no, not Carson Palmer, his brother). It's called Run and Pee, a comprehensive list of convenient times to visit the bathroom while watching a movie at the theatre.

Though the program has yet to be officially approved by Apple, I have approved it as totally hilarious and totally necessary for those who order a liter of cola at the concession stand.

So should we continue to embrace these technologies with eager fingers? Maybe, but the next time you find yourself walking to class, creeped out by the tranquility that surrounds you, just remember that it's natural, even healthy, and at the end of the day remember: no one really likes Ari Gold.

Chris Kelly is a senior English major.