I showed a total stranger a Trump meme on my phone. It was a wake-up call

“Look up!” called my partner. I whipped my head around, but he wasn’t speaking to me. He was speaking to the young woman about to collide with us on the footpath. She looked up from her phone, jolted back into her surroundings, and altered course.

I laughed. “You’re a grumpy old man.”

My partner shook his head. “You watch. She’ll walk into a pole.”

The traffic never ceases on our phones, but nor does it on the roads.Credit: Getty Images

I turned around and saw her, head back down in her phone, about to cross a road. It might be worse than a pole, I thought.

We went into a mini-mart, and I stood by the register as my partner paid for our drinks. As I waited, my hand moved automatically to my phone. I checked my emails and text messages, and without any conscious thought, landed on WhatsApp.

My daughter had sent me a meme about a certain ex-POTUS, and it was hilarious, or a little offensive, depending on your political leanings. I thought it was the former. I grabbed my partner’s arm and thrust my phone under his face, without taking my eyes off the screen.

“Ha!” I said. “It’s brilliant!”

He didn’t respond and I looked up at him. A man I’d never seen before in my life looked back at me. It took me a full second to realise what I’d done.

“Oh my god,” I spluttered. “I’m so sorry.”

I had grabbed the arm of a total stranger and showed him a meme of Donald Trump.

I am passionate about the importance of disconnecting from the online world. I have written a book about the significance of solitude. But technology is so pervasive, so addictive, so habitual, that even I find myself slipping back into its grasp.

I should know better. I should know better because I understand the impact of social media on our attention spans, our self-esteem, our capacity for reflection, our creativity, and our emotional regulation. I should know better because I see the erosion of truth in the online world, which in turn leads to real-life divisiveness and harm.

And I should know better for purely practical reasons. That slip-up with a stranger was not my first iPhone embarrassment.

They’re so connected, but are they communicating?Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

It happened a few years ago. I was walking with my daughter in the Entertainment Quarter in Sydney, heading to the car park with my phone in my hand. She was ahead, and I was scrolling through Facebook while I was walking, my eyes glued to the screen instead of the path before me.

Suddenly, the world went completely dark.

It was very confusing. I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t move. I was stuck, and I didn’t understand why. What’s more, I realised, after a couple of perplexing moments, I seemed to be facing the wrong way. I took a breath, trying to get my bearings, and then I realised I was bent at the waist. There was something hard under my torso. My phone was still in my hand. I had walked straight into a table.

My daughter, skipping ahead, missed the entire thing, but my face-plant was witnessed by several passersby. It was humiliating, perhaps even more humiliating than accosting an innocent stranger with a meme. For months after that episode, I kept my phone zipped in my bag whenever I was out of the house.

But I dropped my guard and relapsed, and it was not my fault. My tiny little human brain is not designed to withstand the addictive forces of social media, which literally uses gambling technologies to keep us all hooked. My smartphone is always there, calling to me, using lures way more sophisticated than just a ringtone.

Peter Dutton wants a ban on social media for under-16s, which is not only contentious, but probably unenforceable. It delays the onset, but it doesn’t fix the problem. Even after 16 – even after 20, 30, 50! – social media is utterly addictive. We are all susceptible to the pull of the online world. We all need to be constantly vigilant, to be aware of what we’re up against, to understand how insidious this technology really is.

The tech giants are not going to help us. They want us sucked into the vortex. They make money when our heads are stuck in our screens.

We need to fight them ourselves, and it will be a lifelong battle. We need to mute notifications, delete apps from our devices, hide our phones away, set alarms to keep us honest. We need to monitor our kids, teach them about the dangers of the online world, keep them away from social media for as long as we reasonably can.

And we need to look up. All of us, for the rest of our lives. We need to make a conscious effort to look up.

Kerri Sackville is an author, columnist and mother of three. She is the author of The Secret Life of You: How a bit of alone time can change your life, relationships and maybe the world.

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