The Absence of Presence

There is a theory rolling around called “Absent Presence” fostered by Kenneth Gergen, and it goes a little something like this: because communication technology is so widely available, and so widely used, individuals who are standing, sitting, kneeling, walking, running, etc. right next to you are not aware of their surroundings or even you.

To put it more simply, when you’re on the cell, you don’t hear the bell.

Mobile technology including iPods, cell phones, Blackberry, laptops, personal DVD players, internet, pod-casting and wrist-televisions have moved the potato’s couch out of the house and into the real world. No longer are we required to be bored by the general tedium of waiting that surrounded out patient, but pathetic forebears. Now, we can tune in, or tune out, of the general noise, chaos and conversation that surround us.

But at what cost, I ask?

AT WHAT COST?

Perhaps that’s a little more vehement than is required.

OR IS IT?

Sorry.

Still, the cost is there. Gone are the days when you might have had to spend a grueling hour of tedium on the train to work and back, trying to tune out the various “train friends” who would talk, laugh, sing, or yodel so loudly that you couldn’t even read your latest George R.R. Martin book (excellent, by the way). Here are the days of hearing someone, who is not psychotic or possessed by demons, talking to themselves; laughing at the ether, arguing with the air.

Yes, children, a time actually existed when something called a PUBLIC TELEPHONE BOOTH was not only practical, it was economical too. There was a time when computers the size of a briefcase were only found in science fiction. When only Dick Tracy had a wrist-watch sized communicator, and only George Jetson has a flying car.

Oh, you think there’s no such thing as a flying car?

http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html

DOOM ON YOU!

But the coupe de ville of this entire Absent Presence phenomenon, aside from the evil, soul-sucking demons who insist on leaving their cells phone on during a movie for fear they will miss THE MOST IMPORTANT CALL OF THE LIFE, was made painfully clear to me yesterday. Minding my own business, and quite unprepared for the horrors I was about to witness, horrors that would cause Poe, Lovecraft and Christina Aguilera to lose their lunches, I went into the bathroom at work.

Now ladies, you may not know this, but there are rules in the men’s bathrooms. Generally speaking, and unless someone is dying, on fire, or selling a winning lottery ticket for pocket lint, there should be NO TALKING. This is not strongly enforced, but most men know that they will lose their Man Card if they insist on discussing relationships, make-up strategies or the latest on That-Bitch-Paris-Hilton.

Yet, yesterday, not only was someone talking in the bathroom while standing at the urinal. Loss of Man Card Factor: 12.5 on a scale of 10.

Not only was said genius talking at the urinal, he was apparently talking to someone on the other end of his cell phone wireless headset while making his deposit.

No, seriously.

And thus I give you the Eighth Sign of the Apocralypse*. Lo, did the leviathan stir, and lo did ten-thousand sushi dinners cry out for vengeance. Soggy potato chips rained from a clear sky, and the land did cry out for cumquats.

I really don’t think theirs is much more that I can add at this point. I’m just going to find a corner and shudder at the horror.


*The Apocralypse is the end of the world, so named because it is an apocryphal apocalypse, nobody is sure when it will happen, how it will happen, and whether it will happen in the here-and-now sense. It is the Tea-Time of the Gods, when the Ice Giants will march against them for the last time, probably without even giving them the lawnmower back first.