Who doesn’t own an iphone?  I have an older 6s model with a cracked screen.  It’s a marvelous device, magical, concealing state-of-the-art circuits, layer upon layer, thousands of semi conductor elements, applied quantum mechanics delivering convenience and entertainment.  You know what I am attempting to say.  Few of us have consciously opted out of owning the iphone, or the nearly identical android phone.

My inner sense tells me, the iphone is a tool like no other, a bi-directional portal to unlimited “opportunities.”  It’s not like a hoe.   Not even comparable to a more sophisticated tool, say my automobile of which I am fond.  I have wondered at the attraction we all have to the screen,  — the compulsion to check for email, or the news feed every few minutes, or the beep signifying the arrival of another text message.  Who doesn’t feel uncomfortable, almost as if a clothing accessory has been overlooked, when the iphone is not at hand?  I have observed individuals, friends walking a path through the woods on a sublime summer day, — staring at their small screens as they walked.  I’ve seen children spend hours attending to whatever is on the small screen if no adult intervenes.

The utility of the screen for education has been given further impetus by the pandemic.  The social, by necessity has been excised from our day to day routines in an attempt to obstruct the spread of the virus.  What result ought we to expect when screen based learning substitutes for the students presence in a classroom with an experienced teacher? What about life lived, — mediated by a small screen?  What do I, the user want from the small screen in my hand?

Similar questions were raised by Jean Baudrillard when he noted the ubiquitous use of the computer in this country, in the mid 1980’s.  Here are his thoughts upon observation of Americans “busy” peering into their computer screens.

What we are wanting here
is to see our thoughts unfolding before us —
and this itself is a superstition.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer,
ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying,
turning the exercise
into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis,
memorizing everything in an effort to escape
the final outcome,
to delay the reckoning of death,
and that other fatal – moment of reckoning
that is writing,
by forming an endless feedback loop
with the machine.

This is a marvelous instrument
of esoteric magic.

…all these interactions come down in the end
to endless exchanges with a machine.
Just look at the child sitting
in front of his computer at school;
do you think he has been made interactive,
opened up to the world?
Child and machine have merely been joined together
in an integrated circuit.

Excerpt, America by Jean Baudrillard, p. 36 published 1986

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“Endless exchanges with a machine,”   seems a fair description of how I’ve felt especially when a software upgrade does not go perfectly.  We’ve all heard stories of individuals attempting to apply for unemployment insurance benefits, to see a screen freeze, losing all information, midway the long application process.  Who hasn’t been there, in Dante’s seventh circle of hell?

Drained of emotional reserve,  living in this world I helped make,  — songs like this one restore my humanity.  Suzanne by Leonard Cohen.

“Let Suzanne lead you to the river….  There are heroes in the seaweed. We are traveling blind…”