Hey, my face is up here!

My darling, I love you, and you know that my love is true. But something has come between us… that new phone just isn’t you.

You don’t need to be Richard Dawkins to know that you didn’t evolve an opposable appendage so that you can thumb-fuck the shit out of your choice of smart phone while I’m trying to talk to you. Or when I’m trying to impress you with the social commentary delivered in the newest South Park episode. Or while we’re meandering around campus together, or while we’re sitting at a bar.

I like to think of myself as a “whatever makes you happy” kind of guy, but this sentiment is difficult to extend when you’re indirectly (but audaciously) letting me know that what I have to offer is of less importance than your twenty character reply to a message which is (statistically) highly unlikely to have any meaning whatsoever. Let’s be honest.

This is what gets me. Most BBM/What’sApp/MXit conversations are drearily carried out purely in worship of the fact that they don’t cost anything. But when did meaningless, mediocre, pitiful conversations become worthy of their tediousness just because they are free? If I really don’t care what you’re getting up to on Sunday afternoon but I happen to find you online, I’m not going to ask you whether you’re watching the Simpsons or jacking it to Johnny Depp in Chocolat, because it’s not free. It costs time, and more importantly attention, which could have been (more wisely) spent absorbing and immersing yourself in your immediate environment rather than being asked and having to answer a question like “So what are you doing?”, with your thumbs.  

So put it down, at least until you’re alone. Or use in appropriate moderation. You’re missing out on emotions conveyed through the eyes in a real conversation necessitated by the presence of familiar human contact, at the expense of colons and brackets in a conversation you would never have deemed necessary had it not been “free” and readily available. Fair trade?