Living In Pandora

Years ago, three to be exact, as Apple announced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said this would be a revolutionary communication device. Pompous yet as puffed up and ingenious as Apple and Mr Jobs have always been, this statement, despite all the criticism, proved to be true. Today, everybody is walking around with an iPhone or an Android-Clone of it. Me too, as well as my kids and almost all my friends.

Everybody is busy touching, typing and pinching on their gadgets, and for that matter, doing nothing else. 

I personally do not care if it’s an iPhone, a Samsung phone or even a Nokia cell phone, the unrivaled popularity of smart phones and the contemptible culture they created, is gradually pissing me off. This, despite the fact that my iPhone solidly grew on me as I am organizing almost everything with it from my professional work to my daily fitness workouts, shopping lists, music, bike rides, travel plans or flight reservations. The smart phone seems indispensable for an individual living in the 21^st century. Combine this with Coffee, another indispensable item of our daily culture, you won’t land further away than Starbucks Coffee. 

I remember visiting a Starbucks Coffee branch in Dade County, Florida, back in 1996. It was the first time I’ve ever been to Starbucks. Honestly, I really didn’t like the coffee itself much, but the atmosphere inside, the people sitting, chatting, enjoying their coffee while having a social blast with each other, appeared very appealing to me. It was an engaging experience albeit the inevitable corporate touch á la “McDonald’s“. A cup of Latte, it occurred to me then, brought the people together.

Enter Wifi. Enter 3G. Enter smart phones. 

Things have changed thoroughly in the last 15 years, as coffee stood firm, more or less unchanged.

So there I was, yesterday, at another Starbucks branch here in Düsseldorf, one of those on the Königsallee (yes, there are three S’bux branches within one single mile). We sat outside with my father, his wife, my brother, his girlfriend and chatted for a while, as we sipped our doppios and enjoyed the gorgeous march weather.

We happened to be the only ones actually TALKING. The rest of the bunch was busy TYPING. Heads down, the white headphones in their ears, texting, twittering and facebooking. No words, no magazines, no newspapers, almost null earthly communication. All we heard were the diverse beeps of incoming messages.

If this is the new social, I am not really sure if I want to be a part of it.

Beyond all their benefits, smart phones did not add much to the traditional social integration, on the contrary, it altered the way we communicate irrevocably. We text more than we converse, we talk and listen to mailboxes, we twitter and we chat over „WhatsApp“ instead of asking „What’s up?“

This is the moment, where I ask myself, „How the hell did we end up like this?“ - No offense to Mr Cameron, but our daily life with smart phones seems to be the best „Avatar“ movie of all times. And wait, there’s more to it.

As we all tend to pump up our virtual entities with everything we got, checking in at trendy locations, posting photoshopped pictures to our profiles, retweeting prominent bullshit and showing off with all facets of self-promotion, the real „we“ is lagging significantly behind, failing to meet even our own standards, let alone live up to fulfill the expectations of our virtual friends in the real world. 

Over time the avatars we created become far superior than the original „we“. We’ll never be that good, that perfect. This seems to be the reason, why we choose to live the virtual life on every occasion, instead of trying to keep it up in the real world.

Here is the big „but“: Any promotion will fail, how perfectly prepped, organized and executed, if the product sucks. 

So, if you do not want to share the rest of your real life solely with your australian facebook-mates virtually, I suggest you to stop photoshopping your ugly nose, whitening your yellow teeth on the computer or checking in a John Butler Concert in New Zealand you’ve never been to. 

Jews have a wise saying: Even a half-truth is a whole lie! 

Even virtually so.

PS. The mermaid photo above was shot by me in Antwerpen, Belgium.