I recently visited someone and was pleasantly surprised when the host offered me a photo album to peruse as she finished up the cooking. Disclaimer: If you have no idea what a photo album is, stop reading right now because you are too young to relate to what I’ve written about this week.
Anyway, that gesture took me down memory lane to that long gone ‘era’ when there was nothing called ‘mobile phone’. To take a picture, you had to make a trip to a photo studio, and if you were fortunate enough to own a camera, you could take your photos but still had to visit a studio to have them developed.
Then came the mobile phone, which swiftly replaced the photo album, which was found in every home in those days. In fact, it had its own spot in the living room, where it could easily be retrieved and handed to visitors to keep them entertained.
You should have seen us poring over the photos, oohing and aahing over the people that we recognised, registering surprise at how much so-and-so had changed or hadn’t changed and asking the names of those we didn’t know and how they were related to the host. Most had more than one album, therefore, you could keep yourself occupied for almost an hour.
I still have my two photo albums, which lie forgotten in a rarely opened dusty drawer somewhere. And no, not in the living room, because I doubt there would be any visitor who would be interested in leafing through them since they were long overtaken by technology. Swiping pictures is more interesting. I once showed my children one of my photo album, fortunately, they were excited, but only momentarily, and then they lost interest. I guess they’d also rather swipe pictures.
A lot has changed since the advent of the mobile phone. The biggest change, I have observed, is how we socialise, or more specifically, how we no longer socialise. I challenge you to visit a restaurant or any other social joint where people meet to socilaise and observe groups of people seated together, or even just two people.
Chances are that almost everyone will be engrossed on their phone, rather than talking to one another. And this does not just happen in social places, even in our homes, where our interaction with one another has been reduced to monosyllables because we’d rather interact with the various devices we have generously invested in.
This may sound strange, but I’m not attached to my phone. There was a time, before the mobile phone became an office, a bank and the fastest mode of communication, when staying an entire day without a phone was not a big deal. Now, transferred anxiety, (What if there’s an emergency?) would not allow me to leave the house without ensuring that I have my phone with me, though this does not mean I will hear it when it rings.
In fact, those who know me keep asking me, out of frustration, to buy a phone pouch that hangs around the neck because many are the times when they call me but the phone goes unanswered, especially on lazy weekends spent at home, when I might leave it in one room in the morning and forget about it until evening.
It is a necessity, but our fixation with our phones is unhealthy and is slowly erasing that social being within us. On another note, what happened to your photo albums?
