Step AWAY from the phone

Disclaimer: I am fully aware of the irony of tackling the subject of technology addiction on a blog, but I've been dying to rant about this for weeks and it's not my turn to write a column for another two weeks.

The crowd is hushed as the stadium goes dark. An electrical current of anticipation passes through the 10,000 people gathered to witness what promises to be a fantastic spectacle. The dull murmur of conversation suddenly builds to a collective roar as spotlights come up on the stage to reveal a shimmering curtain, behind which can be seen a curvaceous silhouette flanked by willowy dancers.

It's her, the multi-platinum recording artist we have all paid hundreds of dollars to see in the flesh. The curtain parts — and 10,000 blue and white screens suddenly pop up in the darkness, aimed toward the stage.

A large part of what follows over the course of the next two hours will be seen not with the human eye, but through three-millimeter lenses attached to cell phones. The audience is not just the people who have paid to fill the stadium seats, but the entire world.

Within moments of Beyoncé taking the stage at Rexall Place in Edmonton on March 26, pictures were being remotely posted to Facebook and MySpace. Video clips were being streamed wirelessly to celebrity gossip websites like Perez Hilton. A running commentary of the show was supplied via text message, email and Twitter.

You didn't even have to be there to see the show. I'm not convinced the people who were there saw it.

I'm not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination, but I was shocked. Number after show-stopping number, the people all around me had their eyes glued to the four-inch screens in their laps, thumbs flying, documenting for all and sundry an experience they paid $200 not to see.

Even I'm not that hardcore, and I'm paid to document events.

To an extent, I get our collective fascination with technology. I was 12 when the Internet went commercial and for many years I felt my online life was just as rich as my real one.

After I went to university, I used instant messaging to stay in touch with friends back home, and I've had a few websites and blogs over the years, none of which lasted very long or rocketed me to my hoped-for level of Internet fame and which I am now kind of embarrassed about.

Nowadays, I'm more of a consumer of online content than a producer. I use Facebook to share photos and interesting articles I come across, and try to update my status once a day because reassuringly, there are people out there who care what I'm up to.

I've become more selective in what I choose to share with the world online, though. My contributions to the global digital dialogue are carefully edited to remove any suggestion of private pain or indiscretion. The result is a mostly superficial online presence — an objective, bare-bones chronology of the past five years of my life.

There's more to me than lists of my favorite things and random facts, but as Technology Review editor Jason Pontin aptly put it, "I never broadcast the substance of my inner life, because I know it would become insubstantial the moment I did."

In a world where it seems things don't happen unless they happen online, I feel an urgent need to keep some things for myself.

Most of the time, that just means self-censoring when I go to post something on Facebook or this blog, saving my gut reactions and deepest feelings for the handwritten journal I have kept since I was 7.

But it also means spending more time on simpler, yet more somehow more meaningful pursuits: losing myself in a good book, going for long exploratory walks, sketching, talking to a friend face-to-face.

I recognize that our world is pretty much driven by the rapid dissemination of information, all made possible by incredibly complex and admittedly fun technologies. But when I see young people and adults alike unable to focus on a single task for more than half an hour without reaching for their phone to check their email, their stocks, or the score on the hockey game, it truly saddens me.

When I think back to some of my happiest memories, they are of times when there was no digital camera present to capture the fun, when my phone was off and the nearest computer was miles away. These memories are also my strongest, perhaps because, undistracted by the compulsion to document the experience, I was able to be more fully present in it.

The undisturbed, late-night conversation over a bottle of wine, the five-hour hike to a sweeping panorama, the moment spent in silent contemplation or prayer, the fulfillment of doing absolutely nothing — are these experiences becoming lost to future generations? Are they just bland, outmoded maxims to be worn on a tote bag alongside reminders to floss, breathe and recycle?

Is anything sacred anymore?

You might be thinking to yourself, "All this because some kids took some pics at a Beyoncé show?"

That was the catalyst for this post, but I've been mulling the issue over for a while. Every time I see a group of kids walking down the street together, each one engrossed in his or her own online handheld game, or a young woman more involved in text-messaging her friend three rows back than in watching a live show, I feel a little panicky.

It seems to me that while we are increasingly driven to prove our existence by leaving a running stream of consciousness in our wake like a slug leaves a slime trail, all this distraction is actually eroding the processes of thought and memory. Everything is evanescent, "live" for a day or two and quickly buried beneath the constant influx of new information.

There are so many layers to this phenomenon I can't possibly tackle them all in one blog post, but it seems to me that the ultimate result of all this documentation will not be a collective remembrance, but a collective forgetfulness — and because I believe that at the end of the day, all we really have is our memories of a life fully lived, that is very scary indeed.

(Note: No phones were harmed in the shooting of the above photograph. My cell phone is three years old and has been dropped so many times it comes apart quite easily, which makes it a handy tool for illustrative purposes.)