Hard to believe!

I came home from work the other day, and as I rounded my house to go through the back gate, two different things came to my attention. One I heard. The other I saw. First, a man's voice. He was talking, having a conversation. Then, I saw him. He was jumping on the neighbour's trampoline. Talking on his cell phone.

This seemed to me to be the height of something. I suppose some would call it multitasking. Redeeming the time. Making the best and most use of every second. He couldn't just enjoy the sensation of jumping on the trampoline by itself.

In my view, this represented some small obsession with being in contact with others at every moment of the day and, probably, night. We have given ourselves over to the idea that we can't be out of touch with others at any time.

Hubert Dreyfus, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, has theorized and predicted that a life lived in cyberspace will strip human life of meaning, relevance, and the ability to distinguish the relevant and important from the nonrelevant and the trivial. His short book, On the Internet, contains dire predictions about human life lived online. On the air waves.

We used to joke about the guy at the office who spent so much time on the phone that he'd have to have the phone surgically removed from his ear. I think that day is coming closer for a lot of people. Only it won't be elective surgery--it will be a necessity.