Lost in a world of gadgetry

In many countries, people are on guard on public transit lest someone makes a wrong move. You cannot afford to be glued to your gadgetry all the time.

One of the strange sights that I can never get accustomed to in Tokyo – and there are plenty of otherworldly idiosyncrasies on view in this most futuristic of cities – is that of row upon row of commuters seated on trains in eerie silence while they stare into smartphones or tap away on the touchscreen of a handset.

It is probably their absent-minded look of not-quite-being-here that disturbs me whenever I catch them with their heads hunched over and mesmerized by the tiny screens held in their palms, as if they are in a collective state of blissful self-unawareness.

It makes me wonder whether such behavior displayed by tech-savvy Tokyoites is derived from their survival mechanism, so as to be able to escape seamlessly into the realm of “virtuality” devoid of the real, in order to cope with the stresses of the daily grind in this notoriously overcrowded Japanese capital.

It is a chilling and alienating sight that invites comparison with those indoctrinated menial laborers seen in "Metropolis," Fritz Lang’s dystopian sci-fi film from the silent era. In the German auteur’s prophetically bleak vision of the future set in a megacity state, hundreds of workers in identical overalls line up each morning in military-like marching processions, their heads bowed as if in resignation, before boarding on gigantic elevators that transport them to the area known as The Workers’ City.

On paper, smartphones are the best invention since sliced bread. No other affordable, mass-marketed consumer products can compete with the multifaceted utility of these palm-sized electronic devices. The smartphone is the precision Swiss Army knife of contemporary technological innovations, without which many of us would feel lost. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, when The Economist recently reported that smartphones are by far the bestselling and most popular gadgetry in the history of commodities.

Despite their obvious merits and ubiquity in our day-to-day life, however, we must be mindful of the fact that digital devices can only equip its user with the illusions of hyper-connectivity and instant gratification through their omnipresent “screens”. The simulacra of social networking and exchange, accelerated communication, accumulation of online “followers”, and so forth, can never be equated with or replace face-to-face interaction, even taking into account the inherent disappointments, broken promises, and heartaches that “real life” presents to us every so often.

As philosopher Alain Badiou claims, “You cannot demand an insurance contract with whomever it is that you have encountered” – insofar as physical encounters are understood to be “contingent” or “possible adventures”, as opposed to the superficial connections achieved through social media that reduce interpersonal relationships to no more than a numerical quantity. (The phenomenon of online dating is a good example of this, where, by dint of careful selection to avoid any margin of randomness, the risk factor associated with love is eliminated from the outset, and with it what Badiou calls the “existential poetry” of chance encounters.)

And let us not forget the linguistic origin of the term “screen”: besides its connotation as a flat surface on which images are either projected or broadcasted, the same word signifies, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “partition” or a “thing providing concealment or protection”. In other words, aided by gizmos, we conveniently “screen out” our immediate surroundings, instead choosing to keep whatever we find unpleasant or inconvenient at arm’s length by the navel-gazing-like act of staring into the tiny screens at the tip of our fingers.

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles”, novelist Bret Easton Ellis once wrote, so pervading is the car-confined culture of America’s West Coast. A similar paradox may be observed when commuting in Tokyo: even though 40 million of us converge daily through the capital’s extensive railway network – said to be the busiest in the world – it is where we least expect the possibilities for a meaningful encounter with another human being. It is where all eyes carefully avert your inquisitive glance and hide in the the display screens of iPhones and Galaxys. This despite the fact that, during Tokyo’s infamous rush hour, we are pressed and packed en masse into the small compartments of the Yamanote and Chuo lines.

So where does our zealous belief in digital technology eventually lead us?

In his farsighted polemical essay published two years ago, "24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep," cultural theorist Jonathan Crary canvassed the profound effects brought about by how practically all of us interact with new media in this so-called digital age: “Within 24/7 capitalism [of accelerated and intensified consumption], a sociality outside of individual self-interest becomes inexorably depleted, and interhuman basis of public space is made irrelevant to one’s fantasmatic digital insularity”.

In other words, what was once experienced communally in a shared public sphere – such as commuting on the morning train – has turned into an altogether individualized and hollow model of reality degraded by screens. In fact, Crary provocatively argues that one of the main goals of today’s monolithic tech corporations like Google, Facebook, and Apple, is “to normalize and make indispensable... the idea of a continuous interface”. In short, what is at stake here is our increasing dependency and subordination to “illuminated screens of diverse kinds that unremittingly demand interest or response”.

What is so ironical about the invasion of mobile phones on public transport is that there are increasingly frequent reports of the commuters in the Tokyo area moving about like zombies, who improbably fall off the platforms and onto the tracks – one such fatality was indeed reported in 2013 – so absorbed are they by their gadgets.

© Japan Today