I’m from Chicago, but years ago I spent an entire summer in Georgia. A few things stand out in my mind from that summer–the steam rising off the sidewalks after a rain, the sun hanging in the sky until after 9 p.m., the view from the balcony of the hotel on the corner…and the infreakingterminable wait in every line in every store I entered. It wasn’t that the lines were longer than the lines back home; it was that every freaking transaction had to come with a leisurely chat about the weather, someone’s outfit, someone’s mother or the new shipment of sandals the store had gotten in earlier that day. Shopping on my lunch hour, I was often called to choose between being late back to work and leaving without my items–there was just no way to get through a line when each otherwise quick sale took minutes to consummate.
Let me just tell you, if they’d had those automated check-outs that Mike was lamenting in Georgia in 1990, I’d have been dancing with joy. There are some things that just aren’t meant to be social activities, and there’s nothing wrong with efficiency. It’s nice to be able to run out to the store and get through the line more quickly. It’s nice to be able to run out to the store and not have to make small talk with strangers. But I do see the risks. E.M. Forster’s prophetic “The Machine Stops” is one of my all-time favorite short stories (the other, ironically, involves a negative interaction at a grocery store check-out counter). Technology is dividing us; there’s no question about that.
In my mind, though, it isn’t the efficiency that’s dividing us. There’s no reason that buying a gallon of milk has to be a social activity. It’s our personal technology that cuts us off from the world.
For a couple of years, I rode Chicago city buses. Years ago when I rode the bus, I met an endless cast of interesting characters, but no more. Today well in excess of half of the riders on the downtown buses have headphones in both ears, so a passing comment is entirely out of the question. Even saying “Excuse me” when the bus nears your stop entails saying it, watching the person next to you remove one ear bud and say something like, “Sorry, what did you say?”and then repeating it so that they can step out of your way. You’d never dare comment on the weather or compliment someone’s shoes or wish someone a good day, because the hassle involved in disconnecting from their technology long enough to hear you would outweigh the kind word for most.
People sit at tables together texting on their separate cell phones; teenagers sit in the same room with laptops in front of them and focus their attention on the cyber-world. Couples’ dinners and family vacataions are interrupted by ringing cell phones that are nearly always answered. What’s worst, we don’t even seem to realize that we’re ignoring the people right in front of us, that we can simply choose to to take out the headphones and turn off the ringer and engage with the people who matter to us. But if a self-checkout lets me get through the store more quickly and home to get on with that, it’s all good for me. I’d rather spend that time focused on my daughter or a friend or my family than chit-chatting with a bagger at the grocery store.
