Like, why would I, like, care about, like, that?

One of the strange new modern quirks in communication comes courtesy of the cell phone. Something that always gives me a chuckle is the sight of two folks walking side by side down the street and one of them is having a conversation on their cell phone. It raises the question: how boring is that person they're with? Are they friends? If so why aren't they talking to each other?

I was asked, last year, by a student doing a project on the impact of new communication tools upon the process of education. The upshot of his questions to me was, "what was it like before you had cell phones and IM?" e.g. "How did you survive not being in constant touch with your moron friends?"

After a brief chin stroke I had to confess I never really felt out of touch. After all, I did have a telephone. I knew my friends' telephone numbers. Frequently I would actually go to where they lived and saw them in person... often carrying on full, open air conversations using verbs, nouns and modifiers. Moreover, we were often in the same places at the same time, drinking similar beverages. Is that out of touch? Then thank goodness for being out of touch.

I read an interview in UNCUT magazine with Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers yesterday. One of his points about the vacuity of current youth culture brings up the point that kids have no skill at being bored any more. He rhapsodizes about "sitting on a wall for six hours" doing nothing except being bored. It makes sense. After a while the boredom festers and you're driven to action... to accomplish... to do something structured and big and sometimes fucking lunatic. These days low grade stimulus (cell phones, IM, iPod, PS2, XBox, YouTube, etc.) provides a constant buzz of low grade radiation that elevates its users a step up from boredom: catatonia. Admittedly this catatonia looks very social, everyone talking to everyone all the time about whatever stimulus they were radiated with that day. William Burroughs said "language is a virus." Maybe then communication can cause a new kind of cancer.

As I write this two young women are sitting about 10-15 feet behind me. One is carrying on a IM conversation with someone somewhere else while the other one is carrying on a one-sided conversation; directed at the first, but really to no one in particular; as she swivels in her chair, smells the inside of her shoes and monologues about her exploits on various wrestling team excursions. A quick glance over my shoulder and my imagination of what that must look like will make eating and sleeping difficult for some time to come.

I can only imagine what the IM conversation must be about, but if it's anything like the real world one...

"When I, like, got here, he was, like, messaging me to come over and, like, see him and stuff. But when I, like, got there, he was gone."