I rode the technology wave a little later than the rest of my generation. I reluctantly switched to a touch-screen phone after the model I was using threatened to fall apart. I was never on Orkut and joined Facebook a good two years after my friends did. I get offended when people close to me prefer the company of a virtual other when I’m with them. I’ve picked a lot of fights over this with friends and family, so much so that some quickly shove their phones under a cushion when I enter the room.
Naturally, I’m not a big fan of the location-based augmented reality mobile game, Pokémon Go. No, make that ‘I’m a Pokémon Go hater’. When I first heard of the game, I thought, ‘Here we go again, another attempt to isolate humankind that’s already on the verge of technology-induced isolation.' Reams are being written about how groundbreaking the game is; how it coaxes people out of their couches and into the outdoors.
But wait a minute. Are they really outdoors? If they are say, at the Nageswara Rao Park in Chennai, are they actually at the park? They’re looking at the park through their phones. You can spend hours in the company of another, nodding away at all that is being said, but mentally switch off and dream of what dad is making for dinner back home. The other person doesn’t realise that you are never really there and just goes on and on. Does this count as spending time with each other? You’re not being fair to the other person.
This is what Pokémon Go is doing — it is bringing us out, making us explore the world around us, but we’re holding on to our phones all along, blind to the real thing. Why, we wouldn’t even stop to observe a dodo, if it perched on a tree in front of us (the bird is extinct, by the way.) People are being robbed at gunpoint, there are incidences of players meeting with accidents — a distracted driver crashed his car into a parked one in Baltimore; a lady in New Jersey had to be rescued by fire fighters when she got stuck on a tree; a teenager was reportedly shot dead near Guatemala City in Central America... All because of a mobile phone game.
It’s sometimes frightening to think of what we’ve done to our lives. If there was an alien invasion on Earth right now, and the creatures decided to hack into our phones to control us, we may as well be handing over our planet to them on a platter in a matter of hours. Because we listen to our phones more than we listen to ourselves.
Of course, there are several ‘success stories’. An animal shelter in Indiana sent out a Facebook post asking players to volunteer to take their dogs for a walk as they searched for Pokémon. There was reportedly a long queue of volunteers at the shelter following this. Then there’s a group of players that rescued abandoned hamsters in Houston. Heart-warming indeed.
But isn’t it a little unnerving that this wouldn’t have happened otherwise? I wish we spent as much time staring out the window or taking a walk. I wish we didn’t need a game to show us how beautiful our world is.
