Predictions for the apocalypse have been made since people were able to write down predictions. That’s a long, long time.
Heck, Sports Illustrated has been showing us Signs of the Apocalypse through the flawed social institution that is the world of sports since 1993. Everywhere we go, impending Armageddon presses down upon humanity like April 15 to an accountant for Goldman Sachs.
So I’m going to venture out into the admittedly frightening world of prognostication and venture my own estimation of why I feel in agreement with the perception that indeed, the spinning orb we live upon is in trouble: Cell phones.
Most American adults over the age of 40 likely recall the time when the only phone in the house was in the kitchen. Pay phones and phone booths were at every street corner and in every bar. I thought I saw a pay phone the other day at the supermarket, only there was no phone attached. I can’t remember the last time I saw an actual, working phone booth replete with an eight-inch thick phone book dangling from a royal blue, wired binder.
At first, I found it terribly distracting to see 18-year-old baseball players fiddling around with their thumbs on these tiny, super high-tech devices in the middle of the dugout, in the middle of games. I had no idea what Snapchat was or Twitter or Instagram and I’m a person who actually had a high-level editing position in Manhattan when interoffice email was first introduced.
Will cell phones and post-modern technology lead us down the path toward the end?
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I couldn’t comprehend what could be more important than being in the middle of a high-stakes baseball game, enough so that even players in the lineup thought enough to take their eyes off the game and look down at some message they were transcribing to lord knows who while waiting for their turn at-bat. It’s difficult to take athletes seriously when they are “Tweeting.”
And I was someone who thought that hip hop was going to sound the all-destructive death knell for society as we know it, or, in this context, knew it. I’ve completely changed course on that perception. It’s the cellular device that’s going to put the final dagger into the heart of who we are.
Take a cell phone away from a teenager today and see their reaction. You can take their car keys away. You can ground them until the end of time. But take away their cell phone and you’ll see how a junkie acts when they are forced to go cold turkey. It’s really that bad out there.
So much so, I’ve developed a deep affinity for those who still don’t have a cell phone, if such a person exists. I feel like I used to actually know someone who did not have a cell phone, but I honestly cannot remember who that person is. Grandmothers who knit Afghans have cell phones today, for heaven’s sake, updating every physical movement of their grandchildren on Facebook like a Wall Street ticker tape of inanity.
“Johnny has a Little League game today and he’s batting fifth!”
I remember riding my bike to many Little League games, always taking care my completely Neatsfoot-oiled $9.00 Franklin mitt was carefully strapped down. I learned more about my hometown and its inhabitants riding along those side streets than most young people likely know about their own environments today. I doubt I would have been on time to games if I stopped to “Tweet” along the way.
I remember sitting on the back steps of the house I grew up in as darkness loomed, cleats and filthy uniform still on. I had no cell phone to call or text someone to let me in. I don’t remember stressing out. I remember listening to the sound of crickets as it grew into twilight’s symphony.
I certainly did not sit there and envision that one day I would grow up and be in a position to admonish young men for sneaking in “Tweets” in the dugout. I somehow can’t imagine Carl Yastrzemski pretending to go to the men’s room in the middle of a Red Sox game so he could “Snapchat” someone about Wilbur Wood’s knuckleball.
I’m not even going to touch upon the massive and out-of-control cell phone pervasiveness in America’s high school hallways and classrooms today.
The problem is everyone is doing it now. Everyone is kidding themselves that they are not doing it and it’s as addictive, I’m guessing, as crack. To me, it’s a pressing feeling of “What am I going to miss?” mixed in with the need to communicate mixed in with the frightening ease of not having to face people to speak with them.
The sheer horror I felt reading “Tweets” from players I had coached, months after the fact, felt like intercepting a note from some girl in the 9th grade that says she doesn’t really like you, but likes your best friend instead. I suppose I’d been living with the delusion that ballplayers in the dugout only care about what the count is and not snap-texting their non-baseball-playing friends about where the “rager” is going to be later that night.
It’s not to say that teenagers or people or athletes are fundamentally and completely different types of human beings today. I’d like to think they’re not. But the sheer compulsion to communicate every last detail of one’s existence, to project onto the worldwide web every last thought we’ve had, has become an epidemic. I still believe there are things better left unsaid and unexplained. I also wish it was that easy to resist.
Who does not have a cell phone in their hands these days?
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We’ve seen people lose their jobs over texting or Facebooking or snap-chatting. We’ve seen good, strong marriages teeter on the precipice of divorce because of cell phones. We’ve seen lives destroyed in tragic accidents because it just seems impossible to put that phone down, even as our cars veer over the yellow center line. I’ve seen coaches stand at the end of a dugout, their fingers tapping away at their phones like they were suddenly struck with the need to write the lost chapter of War and Peace.
What’s wrong with us?
We feel something’s “wrong” when someone doesn’t respond immediately to our “messages.” We are duped into believing that we are “communicating” better with people because of the instant gratification provided by these lightning-fast devices, but all too often our emails, messages, Tweets and texts end up creating more problems for us. I can’t remember a time the house phone in our kitchen today has run and it wasn’t a “survey” or a sales call for lawn care. Cell phones have completely taken over the need for the “home” phone it seems.
Words are so often misinterpreted or worse yet we are falsely emboldened to say things we’d never say in person. We just click “send.”
And for all the “detail” provided and available on this insidious “web” we are not seeing how much detail we’re missing right in front of us.
But I’m not waging war against technology. I confess, it has, in so many ways enriched our lives. This column would have taken me all day on a typewriter in 1983.
But a yellow Touch-Tone phone on a kitchen wall in some mom’s kitchen never caused a car full of teenagers to veer head-on into oncoming traffic. I doubt the rate of friendships ended by typewriter was very high in 1979. My high school baseball coach used to bench players if he turned to us in the middle of a game and asked us the count and we didn’t know it and Coach didn’t receive 17 texts from our parents later that night because they wanted to know why their “superstar” had been removed from the game. How dare he! My son will never get a “full ride” to Clemson now!
And now I find myself policing mid-game Tweets three decades later and resisting the urge to fire back novel-length missives in response to emails I may or may not have fully understood – or fully understand — or wasting precious moments of a finite lifespan scouring over streams of Tweets for information I really don’t need to make my own little world spin. Have we all become complete voyeurs?
So what’s it going to be like a decade from now?
Will athletes be doing their own play-by-play via Bluetooth Podcasts in left field? Will every last borderline illiterate have been “published” via “the web” and affix the word “author” to his online “bio?” Will fifty percent of us all look over our shoulders every day wondering if that compromising photo of our loved ones will one day suddenly spring up on some social network? Will Charlie Sheen still be “winning?”
Or will we have so fully debased the last shred of what little humanity we have left in our society that we can no longer recognize that it takes more to live than a Google search and that there is an infinitely broader range of meaningful, long-term gratification knowing that when you had the courage to walk up to that pretty girl in 9th grade and just ask her if she’d go to the movies with you that she looked into your eyes and actually uttered the word “yes.”
Capecod.com sports editor Sean Walsh’s column One On One appears here weekly. To email him, send to [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm
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