Want to have your heartstrings tugged and be made to feel bad about how you’re living your life? Then the gone-viral video “Look up” is for you.
It’s narrated by a British guy, whose accent gives him an authority Americans can only dream of. He tells the story of a man putting down his cellphone and choosing to ask for directions instead of, presumably, Google Mapping it.
The choice leads to a twist of fate: The woman he approaches winds up being the love of his life, his wife, the mother of his children.
And then she dies, of course she dies — but not before thanking him for looking up from his phone and approaching her on the street.
The point: “This media we call social is anything but, when we open our computers and it’s our doors we shut.”
Yes, the whole video rhymes.
OK, this is the new hand-wringing we all do: We’re spending too much time on our phones. We call each other zombies and worry about what our children think of us. Then we get on social media to share the video about how one of the most useful devices in history is actually causing us to miss life.
Yet it all should seem familiar. My grandmother worried my father would abandon his studies if he didn’t stop listening to those horrible Beatles; he feared video games would make the kids hurt each other. Every generation thinks the next one is messing everything up.
This time is different, we say: This thing we’re all addicted to is going to make our children unable to interact with each other!
Is that true, though? “I can’t stand the silence of a busy commuter train,” says the Brit. I’m pretty sure he’s in the minority on that.
Is there something really wrong with spending your bus ride scrolling through headlines or playing Angry Birds instead of conversing with other passengers? Were we really talking to strangers more before the Internet? Old photos show commuters with their newspapers wide open, ignoring each other.
No, there’s nothing wrong with monitoring how much time we spend on the Web — or any other leisure activity, for that matter. And if it gets to interfere with your life, sure, cut down on it.
But it’s foolish to blame phone usage for missing out on life. In many cases, we’re checking our phone so that we don’t miss out on life.
Maybe we can leave the office earlier or feel safer about leaving the kids with a sitter because we have our phone with us. We’re checking to see if our friend needs directions to the bar so he doesn’t get delayed getting directions from a stranger. We organize our to-do lists, settle arguments, check the time and, yes, make new friends on our phones.
The Brit ends with a plea that we should “live life the real way.” Sorry: There’s nothing fake about those friendships. There’s nothing not “real life” about friendships made or maintained online.
Last June, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a study showing that one-third of recently married couples met online. Guess looking up is not the only way to live.