The green bicycle icon on the traffic light illuminates and I push out, the filter allowing me to take a position in front of the cars headed the same way. From this vantage point I have an unfettered view of the drivers queuing in oncoming traffic. All five are tilted in a solemn bow down into phones in their laps. They twitch a little, remembering that some fleeting upward attention is required to spot the car in front moving off, thus signalling the return to another stint of the driving that interrupts their zealous phone monitoring.
Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere. Once you become anxious about it, witnessing it at scale can feel like wandering among zombies. The bus, the Luas, all festooned with rows of people peering down at their phones.
And why not? Why not put manners on the inbox en route to work so you can enjoy that first coffee in relative peace? Why not get that Christmas present bought, the “big shop” ordered, that email from the school about Christmas hamper specifications read (finally)? Why not a video of a fella singing a song about the beauty of the (sadly misattributed) mugshots of the lads who robbed the Louvre?
I’m no better. I too want to “maximise efficiency” and give myself some breathing space. I’m beginning to see the consequences, though. Last year, an article by Breda O’Brien in The Irish Times bemoaned people not giving up seats on public transport, referring to seat-withholders “stolidly gazing ahead”. But they’re not gazing ahead – they’re looking down. So much of the social order is dependent on the mutual attention inherent in normal sensory experience. When we funnel 90 per cent of our working attention down into screens, we miss a lot.
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I feel like we are prey in systematic attempts to rip us away from one another, often in the name of connection
This includes nice things. A recent bout of hand, foot and mouth disease in my two-year-old meant I spent 30 minutes riding a circuit on the local shopping centre’s escalators. From the grins only tots can elicit, to banter from old lads who’ve “been there”, it was a reminder of how nice it is to just be out and about.
We also miss important opportunities for interpersonal decency (if we register them). I recently saw an obviously frail woman board a packed Luas and be completely ignored by those in the seats designated for such commuters. “Ignored” is perhaps too volitional, because in truth, they were entirely oblivious to that woman’s existence, or anything else around them. When people eventually intervened, they looked (rightly) mortified. (This bit won’t happen to me, because I’m much too anxious to ever take up one of those seats. The risk of offering it to someone who’s just had a large lunch or someone who feels younger than I think they look is too much for me. I’ll just stand, thanks.)
Obviously, people in those seats should be looking up regularly, and indeed the normal functioning of most of the public sphere is designed around people not just looking up occasionally but actively paying attention to their surroundings. The cliche of “living in the moment” is starting to register less as a cliche and more as an urgent imperative.
I feel like we are prey in systematic attempts to rip us away from one another, often in the name of connection. Dad jokes about “antisocial media” hit different these days. My online feeds used to be full of holidaying friends, dogs and snapshots of expanding families, but the balance between that content and ads/addictive clips of funny strangers has swung the way we’d expect. How ironic that Mark Zuckerberg, one of a coterie of similarly nasty men whose idea of post-school-bullying “glow up” seems to be destroying the planet, claims he established Facebook to “connect” people.
Opting out is difficult. I leave my phone up by the bed to force myself to spend proper undistracted time with my kids in the mornings. When it’s time for homework (don’t worry, mine wake very early – we have time), I recall most children’s homework now lives in an app, so I’m forced to return to it.
A 2024 OECD report highlighted the decline of numeracy and literacy rates in most economically developed countries over the last decade (overlapping the period of near-ubiquity of smartphones in those countries), but I really wonder what they are doing to our capacity for normal low-stakes social coexistence. Enforcing strict rules around usage is the only way, since so many of us are now so addicted to our machines that we interact with them without thinking. But increasingly systems that didn’t previously require constant availability now demand it – childcare, work, commerce. The big question here is what we are willing to do to steer ourselves away from the impending phone-zombie future?
Dr Clare Moriarty is a visiting research fellow at TCD’s Long Room Hub
