“If you are swaggering around with your iDevice and you don’t see nature, then why would you want to preserve it?” – Lawrence Millman
VICE Article: A Short Interview With Lawrence Millman
VICE is my home page, mainly because the subjects of their current events are not purely set on the daily antics of the White House. Those stories exist, but can be easily avoided, unlike other “news” websites. The stories that are presented on VICE are usually off-kilter and not what you would normally expect from a news site. I believe that is why they market themselves as a new way for people to be exposed to the world, as opposed to what we are generally subjected to with major media outlets. This is how I came across the above quote from Lawrence Millman, through the article/interview that can be found at the link above. The article is about Millman’s new book that was released and although I have added this book to my Goodreads list, that is not the purpose of the post.
In his answers to the reporter’s questions, Millman speaks about the control that devices (referring to them as iDevices) have on the human population. This is not news, but Millman provokes an interesting thought when he compares a person’s regard for an iDevice with someone’s regard for God, saying the infatuation with the device is like religion. He cites people that have been more upset when their phone malfunctions than if they have a medical emergency, a red flag for where we currently find ourselves as a population. As someone who tries to be honest with himself, I feel that I would care more if my leg was broken. But if I didn’t have my phone with me on the way to the hospital, it would probably feel like I had two broken legs. I have been conditioned to constantly look at my phone, making sure to have it in my possession at all times. I had literally looked at my phone twice while typing that last sentence… and I am someone who consciously tries to avoid this behavior. If it weren’t so generally accepted and engrained in every facet of our lives now (work, home life, in the car, etc.), this would be considered a human weakness and potentially a disease. Why can I not be without my phone?
Millman’s quote sheds a haunting light on our future: If we constantly have our heads down, buried in our phones or devices, how can it be expected of us to care about the preservation of our natural surroundings? Granted, preserving nature is a boring conversation, but I am fearful of the direction we are headed with the increased availability of new technology. Maybe the first step should be to simply appreciate the natural beauty surrounding us on a daily basis. For two minutes. That would be a good start. When was the last time you took a walk or a run, without your phone or headphones, on a breezy, 60/70 degree evening, when the increasingly silhouetted trees are set against the fascinating backdrop of a multi-colored sky?
We seem to always be distracted in some way with what is happening in our lives and although we may actually be busy, we have become immersed in this new American culture. I can have an agenda of what I want to accomplish on a week night or weekend, but won’t get to everything on my list, citing that I was too busy. But was I? Did I have to watch 4 episodes of The Office in succession? Did I have to scroll Instagram or Twitter, making sure to update the feed to see what I had missed whilst scrolling for the past half hour? This is not healthy and has to be altered. We convince ourselves that we were busy, when we were simply wasting time, staring numbly at a screen. The improved technology and immediate access to any information that we deem to be “important” is technically new to us, allowing us to indulge in every new release. If we continue with this pattern, however, what will the future look like? We have to begin to care about bettering ourselves (and eventually our natural surroundings), to extinguish that feeling of need and dependency that exists within us whenever we are away from our phones for any period of time.