Why mobile phones aren’t bad for you
MAnY people are obsessed with their mobile phones, but that is scarcely any different from any other obsessional activity – and it might even be better than some. there has always been a large number of people who are socially limited. take staying in a plush hotel in a major city, for example: it’s not many years since staying in one would have been denied to most of our country’s underclass (and I include myself in that category). It wasn’t because they lacked the money, but because they lacked the ‘refinement’, which in years gone by would have come naturally to the offspring of the wealthy upper classes who sent their children to private education. this is something which those with mass education simply don’t receive — and therein, perhaps, lies a deeper potential purpose for those annoying mobile gadgets. A decent education and rubbing shoulders with the more refined doesn’t always give you the edge (you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear in any walk of life), but there will be those who do learn something from mixing with people from other walks of life on social media. of course, some don’t, some become bored and use short, well-worn phrases and simply ‘forward’ the work of others. I am as astounded as anyone that there are those in their mid-fifties who act like teenagers, denying that the years have made them any less sparkling — but they must realise how shallow it all is. Yet many others will want to be more creative and have more to say on any given subject. In the process, they will learn new words (and even how to spell them), enlarging their vocabulary while maintaining an interesting readability. of course, it is the height of bad manners to be concentrating on a mobile phone while at a dinner party, but it is as well to remember that many of the people who seem confined to social media for their human interaction have little alternative. It takes a degree of insight to read beyond the glossy photos and spin people put into their lives and existence via social media.