5 inches & 8 seconds

I have not spent any time or effort adapting to the mobile existence, even though I fully recognize that 80% of media is being consumed through a mobile device but then I like being a desktop dinosaur or even a laptop luddite. 

The constant thing I hear is "get a cell phone" and having kept that thing out of my life other than one brief stint in a work project where it was given to me as an absolute necessity for the work project, I have been able to function without a phone of any kind, let alone wanting to answer a call.  My natural instinct is that if I can design a life that can operate without a mobile connection and without a host of people messaging me, then I am cool with that life - no matter how many disadvantages that life brings - and so it is I have chosen this bed and sleep as well as I can in it.

The 5" inch screen is here to stay and we are all expected to accept this as the norm, without which we assume that life would otherwise be inconvenient and even very difficult to live out in terms of making a living.  The only compromise I have made is that I accepted a 14" laptop screen because my preferred option of 21"+ is kind of difficult to lug around.  Yet we are not that far away from fold up screens and I cannot wait for that age to arrive because then we can escape the present tyranny of the 5" screen.

I know this to be a tyranny because why would then IMAX size screens remain proper.   This means as we watch our media, engage our messages and even do work on a 5" screen - we want that big screen experience, we want the massive plasma screen and between those two extremes there seems to be a wasteland middle ground - and I don't understand that.  This life that is designed on absolute convenience based on how reachable we are and how occupied we are with all that flows through such a small screen, is a life I think we have conditioned ourselves to accept.  It is not good to reject that conditioning because that is a good as a signal that the individual rejecting this conditioned way is opting out - and the outsider is the one who is distrusted and the focal point of social prejudices. 

If the 5" screen size was not the defacto reality to contend with today, then there is the 8 seconds of attention that multiplies the conditioning - that results in some of us seeking long-form to want a life other than the one we are living.  Short attention spans is the way and has established itself as the norm.  When I first heard the expression "you have way too much time on your hands", it was in the negative that we all assume it be.  I asked myself why such a thing would be bad and if we could design a life that produced that very result - to have too much time on our hands.  Any other way of looking at life seemed deeply mental to me - but to break out of that psyche, it is I that must be assumed to be mental. 

That is the chief prejudice beyond the social epidemics like ageism which can be overcome by changing our own frame as we grow older.  The frame we cannot change is the one where we are actually living out our life of thousands of bodies living for the short-term and engaging short-term thinking because that is the practice of the 5 inch life and the 8 second attention limit, so it is that I live my life among the grassroots of existence and it is a good price to pay.

For sure the one thing I would love is to be cryogenically frozen for another 72 years and then re-emerge at the beginning of the 22nd Century, because that world will have history books that remind us how relatively barbaric and primitive our time today is - and I won't feel like I was born too early, ahead of my time.  I recognize that in a time of blistering transformation it is human beings who suffer the effects of disruption and displacement, because the old order is still holding on tight to remain relevant, and a new order is festering underneath to replace the old. 

Ultimately, it is only a brief respite from living the 5" inch and 8 second existence for me, because I recognize that I have been incredibly lucky to carve this space out and have had the relative privilege of experiencing life this way.  Yet father time rolls on and the things we could get away in one moment become an anathema in the changing winds of time.  It won't be long before I am regimented to the 5" inch and 8 second existence - and I have seen the absolute cost of that even in the words of people who are 17 years old and who don't know any other way of being than this digitized reality they assume is the norm. 

It is not a norm, it is a function of how the technology creators have designed this life transformed and squeezed into short-termitis and small screen living - yet we are surrounded by the large screens of advertisements and billboards that are considered as a norm as we drive or walk through major urban centers.

I enjoyed reflecting on this as I touch-typed on a screen that I can fully feel with my fingers and for sure I can learn emoji or pictorial language to adjust to a two-thumb existence on a mobile device but it would be thoroughly inconvenient as a reflective thinking medium and I would quickly morph into what the technology needs in order me to comfortably communicate, but that comfort level transforms me into a mobile - and until that mutation is my only option, I am thankful that I have the options to avoid the 5 inch & 8 second life.