On a recent flight from Sydney to Melbourne, I was intrigued by the well dressed, educated male on the seat face me. He'd a plethora of devices: iPhone, iPad, photocopied handouts of a substitute online paper, a print paper and the inflight magazine.
On the eighty minute flight he ploughed through everything before him. However, I was intrigued not just by the interactive magazine on the iPad of his but also by the obliviousness of his to each of the passengers. As he continuously twitched, rubbed his hair style and fidgeted, he also picked the ears of his on a few occasions, pondered the wax on his finger and after that ate it.
Not just was I disgusted & rather shocked - after all, that was virtually no doddery aged man and have a pot belly and sprouting nose and ear hair who could be forgiven for senility. This guy was in his early 30s, nicely dressed and naturally conscious of style & image judging by his choice of white, well - fitted clothing. But choosing earwax and taking in it in public? Seriously? The image of a well-manicured and coiffed gentleman dissolved in an instant. Below was a male so immersed in technology which he didn't realise he was snacking on waxy discharge in public.
This made me wonder why he believed he was invisible when there was obviously a planeload of passengers around him. A typical complaint by midlife females is that they're invisible. But, I can nearly guarantee that when a well-dressed, fifty year old lady began picking out her physical bits to consume in public, individuals would definitely notice.
So what made the male think that he had entered a cocoon of secrecy where he could eat and fidget away with no anyone noticing? Does having a pair of technical gadgets capture our attention that completely we forget the individuals surrounding us?
Partly it's a little something to do with the relationship we develop with technology. We straightaway personalize the new devices of ours with passwords, pictures, downloads and then interact rapidly with social media. Technology allows us to dismiss outside the house stimuli so we are immersed in a world in which only 2 things exist: the interface and ourselves.
Engineering is the ideal companion; it does what we want, when we want and where we would like. We form a new reality and feeling of being when we enter technology's lure and, similar to the ancient Greek sirens, it's very hard, once ensnared, to let go.
The drawback of technology is that we are able to become oblivious of the immediate surroundings of ours, the existence of individuals and tvidler consumer reports (bo-gi.by) the planet.