Now I realise as I write this that there might be a few people who view our social media pages using smartphones, so I will start with an apology to them….. I am sorry for what I am about to write! A question that I am increasingly asking myself these days is quite simply, how did we survive before mobile phones? Or perhaps, to refine the question a bit, how did we communicate without them? I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday watching a nearby table comprising two adults and their young child – the mother was messaging on her phone, the father was surfing the web on his, whilst the young child was left to stare at the ceiling. Is this really the example that we want to set to our children? Extending this idea a bit further, could it be that at sometime in the not-to-distant future we will lose the ability to communicate face-to-face altogether? I once saw a young couple in a very expensive New York restaurant texting throughout their meal, and it left me wondering if they were actually texting each other? Had they already lost the ability to talk to one-another? 

Wherever you go, bars, restaurants, airports, public transport, people appear transfixed by their phones. Certainly they are an indispensable tool in modern day life, but it still raises the question, where do we (or where should we) draw the line, before they take over our lives completely? On which occasion should we resist the incoming call or message, and show some respect to the people with whom we are actually sharing our time?

Or perhaps the final question should be….. am I just an old fuddy-duddy?

Now I realise as I write this that there might be a few people who view our social media pages using smartphones, so I will start with an apology to them….. I am sorry for what I am about to write! A question that I am increasingly asking myself these days is quite simply, how did we survive before mobile phones? Or perhaps, to refine the question a bit, how did we communicate without them? I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday watching a nearby table comprising two adults and their young child – the mother was messaging on her phone, the father was surfing the web on his, whilst the young child was left to stare at the ceiling. Is this really the example that we want to set to our children? Extending this idea a bit further, could it be that at sometime in the not-to-distant future we will lose the ability to communicate face-to-face altogether? I once saw a young couple in a very expensive New York restaurant texting throughout their meal, and it left me wondering if they were actually texting each other? Had they already lost the ability to talk to one-another? 

Wherever you go, bars, restaurants, airports, public transport, people appear transfixed by their phones. Certainly they are an indispensable tool in modern day life, but it still raises the question, where do we (or where should we) draw the line, before they take over our lives completely? On which occasion should we resist the incoming call or message, and show some respect to the people with whom we are actually sharing our time?

Or perhaps the final question should be….. am I just an old fuddy-duddy?