It’s funny what resonates sometimes.
While seated in a Turkish pizzeria on a side-street in Cologne, we took a picture of a sign that read “No, we don’t have Wi-Fi, talk to each other.”
People would be better off adopting similar ideas here.
Cologne is known for its cafés and beer halls. The outdoor patios, weather dependent, were full of people, enjoying seasonal goodies like white asparagus along with schnitzel and sausage. As one can imagine, the crowds were lively and conversation spilled over much like the pilsner draft served a half bottle at a time.
On such junkets there is the chance to meet characters from all over the world – fellow Canadians, Americans, Germans of course, even a fellow from South Africa who dabbled in the sale of unusual reptiles and snakes.
Had we been buried in a digital device, closed off from outside influences, we wouldn’t have gained insights on different people, different continents, different cultures and different attitudes. The shared element of these experiences is the notion of diversity – and how often differences are better understood when experienced.
Of course to experience new things one has to be up for the challenge and engage in what is happening around them. This is mighty hard to do when strapped to a smartphone, iPad or similar device, hours at a time.
The extent of this problem, of a society walking around disengaged and disinterested, is getting worse by the day it seems. The great promise of the digital age, where information and knowledge were but a click away has not lived up to its promise. Instead, in a good many cases, it is a wasteland for people inclined to recede from real life and opt instead for associations with equally disinterested and disengaged people content with little social rounding or experience.
In times past we may have referred to these people as drop-outs, content to live in a bubble of mediocrity without goals or a desire to learn more than what early education taught.
Video games and apps, usually the domain of teenagers, has become far more widespread – and ultimately disturbing. It is troubling when friends confide about a loved one, often a pre-university student, suggesting a future in gaming, only for us to add “and let me guess … they know someone who is making a fortune doing this.” It’s a phenomenon with little explanation.
The latest craze sweeping the globe is the Pokémon Go app. People of all ages are stumbling in the street and over cliffs (apparently) to engage in a virtual reality game on their phones, looking for whatever trinket or game-piece they need to win.
It’s beyond this farm boy – and honestly, that’s just fine with him.
The digital stranglehold that grips the free world, from games and such to dropping out of real life or joining terrorists and other such evil fraternities, has many families declaring aspects of their lives device-free zones.
Talk to each other – and experience reality for real.
