I catch the train to work. Not the underground, but the over-ground. American’s might call it “mass-transit”, which to a British ear sounds much cooler, has a touch of the ‘Sci-Fi’ even, as if my journey from the house to the train station might also involve a jet-pack, because maybe that’s how mass-transit travellers roll. Like Boba Fett.
Only, swap ‘mass transit’ for ‘public transport’ or ‘British Rail’, and it feels like the jet pack ought to also be swapped for a Penny Farthing.
Connotations can be funny things.
But what I like about travelling in the morning by train, beyond the fact it doesn’t involve cycling, is how I’m awake to what everyone else in the carriage is up to. Of course, what they’re doing is what I’m doing, and what most everyone does. They’re waking up to their new day, privately getting on with their own private journeys through space and time, going where they need to go to do the jobs and be the people they need to be. They’re in their private-public spaces, private lives and private thoughts, travelling together in complicit and understood near-silence.
The ‘near-silence’, of course, because human beings are typically social creatures, but we’re considerably otherwise first thing in a morning, without sufficient coffee, or when keeping the company of strangers, or particularly when that company is contextualised within what some call mass-transit.
And this happy-silence is gladly aided by our many devices; everyone on their phones or laptops or tablets or kindles, the majority with their heads in one screen or another; distracted; engrossed; consumed and consuming.
A bit like joining dots, through the train carriage, I like to take in the wide-angle, join the screens, look for patterns. And the main pattern is mostly that almost everyone has a screen. Sure, some are reading books or magazines, ones actually printed on paper, but mainly it's lots of screens, quickly underlining to any amnesiac time-traveller with a random penchant for commuting that no one did actually cycle to the station on a Penny Farthing.
And the second pattern I keep noticing is how my fellow commuters are treating their many screen-devices.
It’s so lovingly.
As children, we were always told to look after our toys. As a parent, I tell my children, “Look after your toys!” The conditioning is long-standing, sure, and while not being trashy grown-ups who trash their things is respectable and understandable enough... I think it runs a little deeper.
In the ‘present tense’, technology, by definition, is at once obsolete. My first digital camera, a 4 megapixel Canon, encased in pleasing silver, a gift on my 30th birthday, remains cherished... but was never going to become an heirloom. Nokia is very soon to launch a smartphone (their Lumia) with 41 megapixel resolution.
We know to use our 'tech' for what it does, not what it is. (Boba Fett clearly beat the hell out of his tech; it was full of dents.) And we accept, by its nature, that it comes with a built-in kind of expiration, because it’s so swiftly superseded by the next ‘new whizzy thing’, as out next quarter. But for all of this, for all that we know and accept, I still see the way people put away their iPads as we pull into the station. They delicately re-drape squares of cloth across the screen. They close the lids on their liquid-metal iBooks with a proud twitch of a smile and a gentle click, and tenderly file them back into the padded felt-lining of cases that look sympathetic enough to transport Faberge eggs.
A lot of it is Apple’s fault. It’s Apples fault for creating desirable objects that we covet and feel so compelled to caress. But it’s also ironic, given it’s ‘technology’ we’re talking about (and handling), specific devices that we’ll likely replace many, many times over before most of us figure a way to make enough money so we don’t have to commute each day.
A year or so ago, I watched a presentation given by Adland big-brain, Russell Davies. He mentioned how he grafted a chalk board ‘sheet’ over the lid of his iBook, so he could add a few Old Skool, low-fi chalk scrawls. Rather pleased with his new aesthetic, he posted a picture of his re-styled lap-top online, and was left astonished, bewildered, maybe even a little bruised, by the barrage of indignant outcry, pointing out how such defacing would nullify the guarantee, and just what the hell was he thinking?!
I flew to Berlin this week, just for a day, to look at televisions. It was on the invitation of a client, who makes televisions (and other electrical appliances). Being asked to get on a plane to look at devices that encourage a sedentary lifestyle was a gentle irony I figured it was easier to simply let slide. The event was IFA, not a mass gathering of financial advice, but a big-tech love-in, billed “the world‘s leading trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances”.
IFA was a fun-enough day out, but the tech-fest extravaganza, on appearance attended by many like a pilgrimage, did make we wonder just how much we do and should revere and wonder at our many mass-market devices? The Samsung Hall, in particular, with its waterfall of sheet-glass screens, obsidian black, looking like you could use them to take over the word’s airspace and hold governments to ransom, was both stunning, and bordered on being a little too divine.
No question, technology is getting prettier and prettier, but it will always be the product of a conveyor belt. Going bug-eyed, and “OOO”-ing like the chubby green aliens in Toy Story is, I think, a questionably reverential and sloppy reaction to being shown any electronic device. Even an orgasm-o-tron.
I’ll keep looking for new patterns as I continue to ride my train to work, but I suspect the ‘screen-dots’ will continue to build a picture-repeat. Until Apple start ‘thinking ugly’, and Samsung stop making TVs with installation art in mind, it’ll be a picture of Screen-Devotion and Tech-Tenderness.
If only mass-transit could also become a thing of beauty.
SP.