'Ping' in the tail is sadly hard to ignore

Thinkers simultaneously wonder how we ever managed without smartphones while worrying about the changes the influential little brutes, these ever-pinging pocket tyrants, have wrought in our lives.

I could as easily write a column in praise of my smartphone as a column that grumbles about it, but today, just home after a few smartphone-transformed, smartphone-spoiled days down the coast, I am in grumble mode.

To set the scene: like so many Canberrans of my gnarled generation (I am 75, excitingly only five years short of being age-eligible to write letters to the editor of The Canberra Times) I have been holidaying down the NSW South Coast for yonks. Let us call my most frequented spot somewhere in the stretch between Batemans Bay and Moruya, Phrenology Point (not its real name).

But this latest sojourn at Phrenology Point was my first ever since becoming joined at the hip to a very, very smart smartphone. The vicissitudes of fire and pandemic have kept us away from the coast for a long time, during which smartphones have waxed smarter and smarter.

Once upon a time the quintessential Canberran experience of spending a few days "down the coast" was like unto an exciting experience of a visit to another country, another world. One went from unhappily landlocked and often meteorologically bleak Canberra to the exotically different and balmily sub-tropical seaside.

Then, to go on holiday to the seaside was to leave Canberra and the wider world behind, to make the kinds of temporary (but utter) changes that should be the essence of all holidaying. To go from Canberra to the coast was like going from Canberra to a foreign country where everything is delightfully different and refreshingly unlike the Canberra one has forsaken.

But it is the great wickedness of the smartphone (one is tempted to echo Scott Morrison's condemnation of the Devil as "the evil one" and to start calling the smartphone by that name) is that it brings on holiday with you so much of what one used to rejoice to leave behind.

It brings the whole world, its 24/7 froth and bubble of news and messages and everything, with it. My smartphone does and enables everything my study's substantial desktop computer does, and so this time to be at Phrenology Point was in a sense to still be in my study in my home in my dispiritingly dull Canberra suburb.

Here I hear you scoff, especially if you are a person of some antiquity who has chosen to have nothing to do with new-fangled devices, that one should simply leave the smartphone at home.

"Just say 'No!' to it," I hear you counsel.

But here we enter the territory of the smartphone's malevolent power. Last weekend I would have left the smartphone at home in unhappily landlocked Canberra but for the fact I am a poor weak thing and (like Oscar Wilde's famous character) am able to resist everything except temptation.

Possession and use and perceived dependency upon one's smartphone is an addiction. Indeed it is often an especially and unusually public addiction, for one sees everywhere people going about their public business raptly gazing into their smartphones or raptly holding them to their ears. In my weakness I could no more go to the coast without my smartphone than go there without my legs.

The addiction the smartphone serves and fattens is a feverish need for cheap stimulus, eventfulness and immediacy. Those of us who have always had an unhealthy and incurable interest in news are especially vulnerable to the smartphone's temptations.

In theory one of the great joys of the coast should be (and always used to be) its calming, pulse-slowing uneventfulness. Those of us with fulfilling but demanding, pulse-quickening, stressful jobs in Canberra used to find the coast a kind of therapeutic retreat.

Uneventfulness and a sheer absence of stimulus is or used to be the coast's essence, its magic. Other than the tide sauntering in, sauntering out, sauntering in, sauntering out (why can't it make up its mind?) nothing happens there.

But for the smartphone-addicted these olde spiritual essences of the coast are now easily voided and avoided. Yes, for one's soul's sake one should slow down and admire the patient timelessness of the sauntering tides, admire the sun's eternal emerging up out of the Tasman Sea and listen to the music of the breeze in the leathery leaves of the ancient banksias.

Now, though, all of the saunteringly slow processes of the coast take far too long to hold the attention of those of us made jittery by the illusion of action-packedness provided by our smartphones, by the smorgasbord they serve of YouTube, Twitter, Tik Tok, Facebook, Instagram and their twitching ilk.

On one morning near Phrenology Point I watched some seals lolling and splashing on and around some rocks.

In the olden days I would spend all morning being enchanted by some seals doing seal stuff at their unhurried seal pace. This time, though, I was quickly bored with the seals and easily distracted from them by my smartphone's loud pings announcing that a wider and more buzzing (but more trivial, frothy and bubbly) world was trying to attract my attention.

"Ping!" called the evil one. "Ping! Ping!" And I, enslaved, tempted by my Apple iPhone (mirroring Eve's shameful apple-tempted experience in the Garden of Eden) turned away from the spirituality of seal-watching to obey the smartphone's profane commands.

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