Tech

Today’s prompt: “How is hand-held technology (i.e., cell phones, iPods) affecting public social behavior and interaction in the public space? How has it impacted everyday street life and our ability to meet and deal with strangers?”

The inclusion of “iPod” in today’s prompt led me to check the copyright date on this book of writing prompts. It is ten years old. A lot has happened in ten years. I’m sure that if you were to go back in time and talk to the authors of this book about social media, they would be absolutely shocked at its role in spreading anti-vaccine propaganda during a global pandemic that has killed over 5 million people worldwide; about the way it has been abused by foreign actors to wreak havoc on our elections; about the role it plays in causing eating disorders in teens; about Facebook’s ties to sex trafficking; and about the way it has spread conspiracy theories like QAnon.

On an everyday street life level, however, it has also contributed to a lack of awareness of your surroundings. You walk down the sidewalk with your air pods in, staring at your phone, completely oblivious to everything about you.

Hand-held tech being everywhere has a third effect. Technomancers have had a harder time controlling their powers when they’re constantly surrounded by handheld devices and bluetooth waves. Rumor is a technomage once accidentally took out ten city blocks when he got too close to an AWS data center. Of course, your eyes were on your phone when a nearby technomancer was overclocking due to the exposure to too many nearby pedestrians all on their smartphones at once. You didn’t even see them juddering with technomagic power, electricity crackling down their limbs and shedding itself along the roadside as they were lifted into the air by the spike in their power. You didn’t notice as all the electromagnetic fields of all the devices around them intersected and flooded the technomancer until they could absorb no more. And you didn’t even look up from your phone as they transmuted all this technomagic energy into raw kinetic power, ripping up the nearby concrete and emitting a force blast that killed five, including you.