The Ethereal Delights of Touchscreens and Twitter

It feels good to be back. Yesterday marked a month since I last posted a blog entry, and nine days since I returned back to Jacksonville. I guess my blog is a bit of a misnomer now, since I’m not “in London,” but I’ve decided to continue writing for the time being because 1) there’s still a bunch of my semester about which I haven’t talked, 2) I see my reflection on the semester as a vital part of the “abroad experience,” and 3) I like having this soapbox. So to start, let me give a brief overview of what’s happened since you last read about my exploits to Barcelona and my internship. Our program took a weekend trip to Cornwall (the southwest corner of England) on our second-to-last weekend of the program, and my remaining time in London was largely swallowed up by finals (especially the 3,500-word essay on the 1867 Reform Act that I miraculously wrote for history). Finals, as well as my internship, were wrapped up by Wednesday, but instead of spending the last few days sightseeing I hit the cold, hard reality of packing, cleaning out the flat, and preparing all of my travel documents. With everything in order, I left London on Saturday, April 20^th to begin a two-week trip around central Europe and Scotland. I have the trip outlined below:

·      April 20-23: Vienna, Austria with my parents for sightseeing

·      April 23-26: Prague with my parents for the same reason

·      April 26-29: Glasgow and Isle of Skye, Scotland with my friend Josh (from the program) to go hiking

·      April 29-May 1: Amsterdam (again) with five friends from my program to attend the Queen’s Day festivities

·      May 1-2: Back to London to stay with my friend Elston (the actual Londoner)

·      May 2: Fly from Heathrow to Atlanta, and then to Jacksonville, where my mom picked me up at the airport

Everything in this overview deserves some lengthy reflection, but since I know that you’ll start to zone out and look for paragraphs to skim if my posts go over about 750 words, I’ll talk about them in subsequent posts. For now, I want to talk about one of my most surprising moments from my trip home:

One of the first things I did when I arrived in London (I think it was my first errand) was to get a cell phone. Annoyingly, Verizon and Sprint cell phones don’t work in Europe (and in most of the world), but since cell ownership is approaching the level of basic necessity in the developed world most of us in the program invested in U.K.-based cell phones. As we were only there for three and a half months, we opted for cheap, pre-paid plans with no data and those ubiquitous £5 brick phones. As a result, I didn’t text much this past semester and I even stopped checking my phone every ten minutes because I knew no one would be texting me anyway. Despite this tragedy, the phone ended up being serviceable and even quite dependable as I traveled across Europe. Yet as my flight home approached, I became more and more excited to get back to my American smartphone with its somewhat finicky touchscreen and its 3G capabilities. I missed the ease of my QWERTY keyboard as opposed to the clunky T9 system, I missed being able to send a text without worrying about it costing 10 pence, and a bit conceitedly, I wanted to see what text messages I had missed in my long time abroad—I wanted to see that people had indeed missed me. (I ended up being greeted with precisely zero texts upon my arrival as my parents had suspended service while I was abroad—sad Jonathan.) Anyway, I had packed my phone under a bunch of clothes and such, so I made the trip back to Jacksonville still with my U.K. brick phone. When I got home, one of the first things I did was to unpack and find my phone buried under everything else.

After a few minutes of searching, I found it and hurriedly turned it on. Yet as I waited for the phone’s operating system to boot up, I was struck by an unexpected feeling—I felt a pang of revulsion. While I had been thinking only of the technological ease that my smartphone afforded me, my emotions seemed to be telling a different story. As I saw the phone turn on for the first time in months, I remembered not those times where I checked Twitter using my 3G capability, but the countless times I sat restless, waiting for texts that would never come. I remembered being devastated by petty conversations that never needed to be had, and above all, the constant, unrelenting urge to glance at the screen of my phone in all situations, even when I knew it would be rude and insensitive. I’m not one to rail against the dangers of new technology, but I do think it says something when the most enduring memory of our new connectedness is the disdain that we’re letting it run our lives. At any rate, I think this semester has shown me what I already knew, but perhaps never took to heart: I only need technology to lead a fulfilling life when technology brings me closer to other people. Everything else is just superfluous.

Pictures to come soon!