Quartz:
Are you reading this on a handheld device? There’s a good chance you are. Now imagine how’d you look if that device suddenly disappeared. Lonely? Slightly crazy? Perhaps next to a person being ignored? As we are sucked in ever more by the screens we carry around, even in the company of friends and family, the hunched pose of the phone-absorbed seems increasingly normal.
US photographer Eric Pickersgill has created “Removed,” a series of photos to remind us of how strange that pose actually is.
This is a really interesting photo set that might make you think about your phone use a little bit.
“Why, if we remove the thing that makes an action make sense, it makes no sense! Look how meaningful this is!”
(cf. all those photos from the 60s and earlier of people … reading newspapers.
And ignoring people around them, hunched forward!
At least a phone is often used for interaction, after all.)
Oh give me a break. 20 years ago the exact same photos would have had people reading books, magazines, and newspapers. And nobody was crazy enough to suggest that there was some sad lesson about the loneliness of modern life by airbrushing out the printed matter from the photos.
But, the minute you replace the old and familiar tech of print on paper with the new scary tech of pixels on screens, suddenly people start bemoaning how awful and unnatural and antisocially everyone is behaving, looking away from their fellow humans towards the text held in their hand. What utter BS.
Odd that he uses “edits out” to describe taking the physical phone away before the shot is taken. That makes it seem contrived to me.
That was my reaction too. I guess, from the headline, I wanted it to be more scientific.
I thought that as well, but on reflection it could also be a commentary on a human condition that isn’t tied specifically to a piece of technology or an era. If the same thing was happening 20 years ago, just on different technology (and 30 years ago, and 40 years ago, etc.) perhaps its a statement on the willingness of humans to spend more time in the worlds we build in our heads than the one we inhabit with our bodies. I would expect it’s up to interpretation whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing or some of each.
Yes, that’s the craziest thing of all. Thanks to technology, we’re more connected than ever in human history, and this guy’s trying to make some sort of tortured point about “loneliness”.
I can’t wait till we can all look back on crap like this and laugh at it like it was Reefer Madness.
Lonely? there are people on the other end you know.
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