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Bonding, regardless

May 23, 2024   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

I have an iPhone 6. Yes, it’s like a confession and people laugh but it was working okay until yesterday when it needed the plug that charges it to be held in tighter – or something.

After a lot of fiddling, I managed to prop the plug up with a little plastic jewellery bag and scotch tape – obviously, a temporary measure. My daughter Patricia insists my next phone will be an iPhone 12 – “It’s very user-friendly,” she insists, even knowing me as well as she does. 

Feels a bit as though I prefer my cave to the modern world.

Not entirely: it is the spying that repulses me. Edward Snowden rang plenty of bells and whistles in 2013 when he was conscience-stricken at the extent to which his fellow Americans were scrutinized and fed propaganda by their government to delve into their lives and businesses. Snowden was appalled at the indifference to the laws that should have kept people’s privacy safe and he dedicated his life to that exposure of governments and their agencies.

Nor did he expose just the American government. He upended the nefarious conduct of so many governments, including the Canadian and the British. He now lives in Russia where, after some years of his temporary residence there as asylum, Putin granted Snowden Russian citizenship.

Even before Snowden, we must have guessed that we are listened to, watched, pushed and pulled. Since Facebook,(2004), we have been so happy to give away every inch of our most personal lives. As technology grew, it has never occurred to us to keep anything back and, generally, we admit that everything invented, every technological step forward has been sociological steps back.

Yet, we have stopped at facial recognition technology. In China, every step a person takes anywhere, all the time, is recorded: when, where, why and who but we object to that.

Yet again, every second of communing with our personal tech equipment, like our passionate clinging and intimate relationship with our cell phones is the craziest of all.

Ah, Mr. Snowden, there were lots of these personal tech attachments in your earliest days. Did you ponder and shake your head at the notion, let alone the truth, of how deeply we each had fallen, as soon as the opportunity had presented itself, to own a tiny device that would own us, practically, as nothing has ever done before?

They are pure little gold mines of data cascading into the grateful receptacles of industry and governments. Eureka!

There is plenty of writing about this. Millions of doctors and “wellness” experts are advising – nay, even pleading with us to leave the things at home for an hour’s walk or the chance of a similar time of reading – or just time without!

They beg us not to expose our darling children to their own screens in their babyhood but we can’t wait to see how cute they’ll be surfing the net earlier than they can walk.

Possibly, I exaggerate; I hope so, anyway.

Of course, in our turn, we are inundated with offers, information, cute stories, and the worst – the news. Man, oh man- we are quite rightly bombarded from every side, our phones panting to keep up, burning their charger chords to a crisp in the terrors and threats they deliver as our early morning eyes struggle to focus on our little screens.

Did I say “rightly”? Well, yes, for in this volume of information, much of it filled with matters in our own backyard, with matters to which we must personally object, comes imposed responsibilities.

From the dangers to our own counties and towns on everything we hold dear, reasons why we have wanted to live here – the restraints on local democracy in Caledon, which will spread across municipalities all over the province; the terrors of a planned and unnecessary highway of incalculable damage to an extremely wide spread of rural land and fragile wetlands from the Hwy 400 and across Caledon and Wendat land.

Locally and further afield in our own Canada and other lands where children are starving and abused; where there is war; where the creatures of our world are suffering and under threat of more….

So much, so early for our sleepy eyes in the bearer of such news, which we feel so strongly we must consult, as the first thing people compulsively do…

It’s getting late and the cat has started knocking things off my desk as a protest that I am not paying enough attention to her needs. Is there an empty cat dish in the house? Have I brushed her yet today?

No, the reality is that today, I somehow spent hours in a city mall, at a cell phone kiosk, buying a new iPhone 13, for goodness’ sake.

Right away, I don’t like it ’cause it does not have that nice little button that pushing sent things away. Once, I had a Blackberry, you know, and they were better, clunky, real little keyboard.

Now I have this monster and its case doesn’t even have a cover. You can bet I’ll fix that pretty soon.

Well, it’s spring and I would go back to my cave but the bear has had her cubs now and they take up too much room….

Meanwhile, here’s a little reading in case you have not heard: https://environmentaldefence.ca/2023/10/09/top-reasons-why-building-highway-413-is-a-very-bad-idea/

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