Jonah Kondro
We all are beginning to ascend into the New Year. As the months move forward, many of us are starting to abandon our resolutions and we single folk are more concerned with how the evening of February 14th will unfold.
New Year’s resolutions are often stated publically between one another and for the first few days of January these resolution updates tend to pollute my Facebook homepage feed. Lots of resolutions are generic: lose weight, eat healthy, read more, become a better person – all of those examples are admirable feats – if conquered. Nobody tends to report their failed resolutions, especially not, through social media.
I have a silent resolution that started to materialize back before the Christmas holidays. I’m slowly closing the doors on the majority of my social media profiles. These included: Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Tumblr. Many of these social media applications were easy to leave behind when I lost my smart phone and reactivated my archaic flip phone.
I’m not an aging man that is grumpy with all the technological change around me; I’m a twenty-seven-year old part-time automotive technician and part-time college student. I can honestly say I can remember before the internet existed when I had to ask for a girl’s home phone number; and I would pray to some unseen deity that one of the girl’s parents wouldn’t answer when I called.
One day during this previous summer I suffered a tremendous defeat – I lost my smart phone. Earlier in the afternoon that day, I had successfully acquired a beautiful brown-eyed girl’s cell number in an establishment I was eating lunch at, with a buddy, in Red Deer.
It was on the ride home – I was out and about on my Harley – that my smart phone must have slipped out of my pocket succumbing to destruction upon Highway 20. It wasn’t the payout I was charged to remove myself from the smart phone contract and to reactivate my old flip phone, it was losing a pretty girl’s phone number that caused frustration and disappointment.
I had visited New York City a few years ago with a friend and his sister. I cannot recall which year we went, but I remember the time period because it was shortly before the big smart phone boom. This wasn’t around when I got my first smart phone; that was way after the craze commenced.
In NYC people would talk to me at the cross walk. Then I would witness New Yorkers talking to each other. Then they would walk down different streets afterwards apparently not even previously had known one another. I sat on the subway and had a light conversation with the person next to me. Standing and reading the Wall Street Journal in front of a Walgreens, a man was walking by and stopped to comment on my tattoos. On the street level people seemed to interact with one another; I hope that remains true of New York City today despite of the social media pandemic.
Social media and the infection of the smart phone has caused many people to carry themselves with their eyes down at their device. Real conversation between people is becoming a novelty in amongst all the social media profile following, shares, and likes. I personally don’t want to become psychologically attached to electronic device and I’m glad to be operating an old flip phone again – despite struggling to write text messages using T9. So in wake of this new year we call 2015, I’ve decided to go through the difficult task of decommissioning my social media profiles and maybe I will get to meet a new person without encountering their profile image first.
My finger is still hovering over the deactivation icon for my Facebook account though.