Me, you and our weapons of mass utility

By Yeoh Siew Hoon

It was a moonlit night on the beach. Actually the light was coming from a gigantic globe on the lawn but for the purpose of this article, we shall pretend it’s the moon.

It was a moonlit night on the beach. On the horizon was a fairyland of lights. I later learnt it was the Jurong Island oil refinery but at the time, I thought it was a highly-electrified Disneyland.

I was having dinner at Barnacles, Shangri-La’s Rasa Sentosa Resort beachside bar and restaurant and not having a conversation with my two dinner-mates because both of them were very busy with their telephones.

Isn’t it interesting what the mobile life has made us do – ignore present friends and talk with absent ones? I often feel I have more conversations when I am not with my friends than when I am with them.

We text each other like crazy and then we are together, we look at each other like we are crazy. ‘So what are we going to talk about now that we have told each other everything we were doing that day?’

“At lunch with client.”

“Wht u eting?”

“CC (chilli crab).”

“Wa, HTWWEC (how to talk when eating crab)?”

“CTN (can’t talk now). HD (hands dirty).”

The 25-year-old Japanese man Tomohiro Kato who drove into busy Akihabara district in Tokyo and killed seven people in a stabbing frenzy sent a lot of text messages – to himself.

His mobile phone was his best friend. The newspapers called him a “mobile phone addict”. He posted 200 messages a day on a cell phone website, airing his frustrations to an all-reading but un-caring world. They say loneliness and anger drove him to do what he did.

I went to the beach the other day with another friend who spent most of the time taking photographs with her mobile and listening to music through her mobile. We have become mobile photographers and MP3 players.

The new iPhone and the new Mobile Mail, unveiled by Steve Jobs last week, I am told, can do “everything”, according to any Machead you ask. I assume that means if you point it at an egg, it can boil it with gamma-rays as well.

Convergence of technology is happening and guess what, it’s converging on you, me and folks like Tomohiro Kato. It’s making us mobile warriors with weapons of mass utility.

One of my dinner friends paused his texting, looked up at me for a second and said, “What’s the etiquette these days? In the past, people frowned at this but it seems to be accepted these days by a lot of people.”

It’s called “unsocial creep”, I think. Bit by bit, we allow that which would not have been acceptable become acceptable until it becomes the norm.

Norm, however, does not mean normal. Just like common sense. Doesn’t mean it’s common.

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