We are connected to each other and to the same degree further apart. Fifteen years ago I might have been forced to strike up a conversation with these younger people. What would most likely have been nothing but a forced chatter about the price of lattes or the weather, would have been something as opposed to nothing... Some form of human contact. Maybe an interaction with the type of person I normally wouldn't associate or converse with at any point in my day or any other moment in my life. The screen on the phone connects us to the comfortable experience, the people we know and the people some computer program thinks me might like to know, the clothes, music, film, literature and various products that fit our demographic, the type of news we would like to consume rather than the news we should really be aware of as citizens of the world...
I feel guilty because in this modern technologically driven urban center of Los Angeles the idea of community and shared human experience is dead or at the least taken for granted. There is nothing connecting us to the reality of places where all people have is each other. The people of third world countries might marvel at the innovation and efficiency on display at a Starbucks( which by the way has a business goal called 'the third place' in which every local corporately owned and run store is strategically made to feel like that comfortable place you hang out at when you are not at home or work: the third place) but what would they think of not really being able to express the joy of the experience with an isolated commuter wearing earbuds listening to a podcast on his way to work?
I do, I feel guilty.
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