RANT: Tip Tap Claptrap

I don't own a smartphone. Luddite that I am, I don't feel the need, quite frankly. I'll probably succumb some day, but, for now, I somehow seem to be very unmoved by the proliferation of 'smart' telephony and the umpteen gadgets that flood the market, flood society, flood our very senses.

"Flood our very senses?" Yes, all the time and everywhere. I am confronted by people tapping and flicking away at their Blackberrys and iPhones and countless other contraptions. And they do flood my senses. I know that because I am both bothered and annoyed by all this constant need for tipping and tapping of so much claptrap.




It's really struck me hugely of late just how joined at the fingertip so many people are when it comes to their precious little smartphones. I was recently on a business trip to Cape Town and it seemed to be so pervasive - at dinner tables, on the beach, on the airport bus driving us to our airplane, even on the bloody plane that has barely reached the terminal building after landing.

Interesting (or potentially interesting) conversations cut short because people just had to flick through a series of pics on their phone or a huge need to answer that latest e-mail or IM, of course.

Hordes of people flicking and clicking and tip-tapping away at their devices. Endlessly.

In being so feverish in the need to be so switched on, people are of course so switched off from everything around them. It's all about that little screen, those little fingertips. Nothing else matters. Little smiles or grins to themselves, little giggles emitted as if they have just heard the most witty ditty since Oscar Wilde walked the Earth, when we all know its just the latest 'friend' who's 'nudged' them on Facebook or told them about their baby's latest bowel movement, or some other facile crap...

Flippant, intense, casual, moronic the looks may be as they tip tap away - but it's all the same, really.

It makes me self-conscious and even embarrassed when I check my SMSs, almost chastising myself for being caught up in this tip tap claptrap 'revolution' of endless, boring as hell communication.

Lets' face it: where is all of this going? For all this endless, continuous communication, I have never seen such a lack of communication between people or even felt so disconnected from others as I do now. For all the ease of an SMS or e-mail or IM or tweet or nudge or whatever else is the going tip tap claptrap fad, where is the pleasure in receiving any of these when compared to a hand-written letter or a card or a telegram, or even a phone call (on a landline, of course) for that matter?

I'm not that convinced it's adding up to much. At all.

Flicking, tip-tapping all over the place - it's all mostly quantity over quality, posturing over reality, style over substance.

Do you get my point?