#I mean mate you didn’t believe I had adhd until two years ago

[gaiatheorist]

Not-so-smart phones?

Flicking through the headlines, and generally trying to avoid anything with ‘Apocalypse’ in it, the first two I skimmed through related to mobile tech. I remember when we didn’t all have the internet in our pockets at all times, when ‘the internet’ was that one computer at school, that each class got about half an hour a month, to talk to another school. I remember when a ‘phone’ was either the house-phone, that your Mum would pick up the other extension on, and listen to your “No, you hang up...”, or various public telephone boxes, where you needed a handful of change, and to avoid the smack-head waiting to call their dealer.

The kid didn’t have a smart-phone until he went to Uni, he’d been using the same mini-brick he’d had since he was 12, topped-up with £10 credit about twice a year. He didn’t open a Fakebook account until he was 16. That’s not my CEOP-training, or my Safeguarding head, he went through the swearing-at-strangers-on-Xbox-live stage, and I think he uses Steam to chat to his mates. ‘I think’, Gods, I’m one of those dinosaur-parents, who doesn’t actually know what their child is doing. I’m not overly concerned, he leaves his laptop open, and his phone and tablet lying about, there’s no element of concealment to indicate there’s anything he wouldn’t want me to know about, so I don’t try to look.

(My head’s doing that then/now thing it does sometimes, I’m amused by the thought of time-travelling back to my teenaged self, and not being able to immediately search any given thing, instead of going to the library to look it up.)

The kid hasn’t been kept in a cupboard under the stairs, he’s sort of come-of-age during this period where the instant-internet is normal, to the extent that we both get exasperated when the connection glitches, and we can’t watch TV-from-everywhere over the broadband at the same time as we both have several devices connected to various other apps. (Look at that, ‘apps’ doesn’t flag on spell-check any more.)

Smart/stupid link on spell-check, there, and my bubbling rage when Fakebook people just let anything that isn’t underlined go. Just because it IS a word, doesn’t mean it’s the right one. That’s another rage-bubble I need to work on, because it’s able-ist, It doesn’t matter that spelling and grammar errors make me twitchy, but it does sort of loop back around to the point of this ramble. In 2003, when I started working as an SEN teaching assistant, I was assigned to a group of students who had been removed from their GCSE English class. Not a disruption-removal, they’d been removed from the bottom-set English class because they couldn’t read. Rolling back my ridiculous memory, they were all in the Moderate Learning Difficulties category on the SEN ‘register’, I had four regular ‘MLD’ students, and occasionally the SpLD lad with the ‘Specific Learning Difficulty’ of dyslexia. Oh, sometimes I had the boy with Asperger’s and ADHD as well, but only if one of the MLD boys was absent, because if you put them in the same room they fought. That was how SEN students were catered for back then, the weakest students were removed from the mainstream class, and plonked in a room with a teaching assistant (being paid thruppence ha’penny an hour to teach the curriculum.), because that was a more effective use of resources than the teacher having to spend half the lesson trying to ‘keep them on task’. (More accurately, trying to stop them masturbating under the desk, or falling off their chairs again.) 

‘Teaching’ four children who couldn’t actually read, without a degree, or a teaching qualification. I know, brilliant, isn’t it? 

Rambling. My point was that the particular learning difficulties those children had led to a LOT of pick-the-first-word-spellcheck-suggests essays. The kids had no real clue what most of the words said, and “Look it up in the dictionary.” was never an effective solution, they couldn’t ‘look it up’, BECAUSE they didn’t have enough of a grasp of spelling to even know what the word started with. English is awkward like that. (Saw one of them on a bus a few days ago, so at least one of them managed to survive to the age of nearly-30.) Back-then, they didn’t have mobile phones, and I doubt they had the internet at home. (Some of them didn’t appear to have washing machines, or parents with the ability to use one, anyway.) 

Back to the present, ALL the kids have mobiles, and it’s a rare house that doesn’t have ‘the internet’. Even the in-laws have ‘the internet’ now, although what they actually have is permission to use next door’s broadband password. (Which they probably have written in a book somewhere.) Fantastic, virtually every piece of knowledge humanity has ever acquired, at our fingertips, all the time. (So we use it to start fights, and look at pictures of cats.) The news is accused of dumbing-down to reach a wider audience, ‘exams are getting easier’, ‘university students are buying essays online’, and now, the fact-checking thing. As much as we have an element of society that will always pick the first word on spell-check, we also have an element that will believe the top-result on any given internet search. (Even when it’s a bloody advert.) The woman in whichever-African-country who thought her phone could scan her fingerprint and provide ‘the answer’ to whether she had AIDS. Scary world, people.

Even more scary is the man in Ohio, who live-streamed himself murdering a stranger. In the olden days, we wouldn’t have known about that as-it-happened, we would have had to wait for a printed newspaper to tell us about it the next day. We didn’t have 24-hour-television-news back then, an emergency broadcast was a very rare thing, but generally meant the death of a member of the royal family, not the apocalypse. Now? Now we’re so used to the ‘breaking news’ banner popping up, that it barely even registers. That desensitisation is a protective mechanism, because if we all read all of the news all of the time, we WOULD go completely insane. Our bubble-worlds, and the repeated articles about ‘digital detox’ are a strange reflection of how saturated we’ve become by the ‘connectivity’ that’s crept into our ‘normal’. 

I’m smirking at myself, the smart-phone that never leaves my side is pretty much never used as a phone. I looked at the call-time total on it a few weeks ago, and I’ve used 16 minutes. I’ve had the phone over a year, and the TOTAL talk-time on it is 16 minutes. I don’t talk, I type. My phone is a camera, to record stupid-shit-I’ve-done, and a calendar/reminder, alarms all over the place, to remind me to eat, or take medication, or put trousers on. My phone is effectively my ‘carer’, but that’s not why I have a gripping phobia of dropping it and breaking it. We ‘all’ have that, don’t we? The panic when you tap the pocket where your phone should be, and it isn’t? The Fear of Updates, battery-panic, and that subconscious thing we all do where we know where the signal-dead-spots are. We’re not scared of being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger any more, we’re scared of being without wifi. 

There’s no real point to this one, I’m not going on a digital detox, because I barely ‘connect’ with anyone. I’m aware that two messages came to my phone last night, but I’m not breaking my neck to respond to one of them. (Fakebook fact-checking-man pointing out that I’m ‘quiet’, and asking me if I’m OK, I’ll lie to him later, because my sleeping patterns are out-of-synch with most humans, and his wife HATES me, I don’t want to ‘ping’ his phone and start some sort of domestic between them.) That’s the other thought-stream on this, I’m deliberately keeping my head down on Fakebook to disengage from ‘work’. The union lady said this would happen, that the longer I was off, the less people would try to engage with me. “You’ll be able to tell which ones were your real friends, because they’ll keep in touch.” That’s a most-people rule, though, it doesn’t apply to me