Don’t move. Not a single eyelash. Remain perfectly still.
What form has that body of yours taken? Has your spine manifested the scoliosis curve of your 6th grade nurse’s worst nightmares? Does your head incline perilously downward, skull perpendicular as you peer into your phone? The device sits in the crooks of your fingers with a thumb poised to scroll or swipe. Does the way your fat bunches up between your jaw and neck unnerve you? The flab is comfortable when you can ignore it and scream inducing when you can’t.
Perhaps you haven’t gotten out of bed yet. Locked horizontally by gravity and heat, you must rely on your arms to bring the screen to eye level. Tiring, you opt to sacrifice the integrity of your vertebra in order to leverage the back of your head against a pillow. Why not take a picture of yourself, chin rolls and all? The glassy stare is endearing, though you may have been trained to abhor it. It is you at your least offensive.
The more industrious among you have already pulled out your laptops–a vital first step in beginning the day’s workflow. You half sit, half lounge like the rails on one of those library rocking chairs. Some of you make fantastic use of your bed’s headboard. My bed lacks one of those. My mattress rests atop a cheap metal frame from Walmart, and the door to the water filter prevents me from pushing the thing up against the wall.
If you like to do phone and computer things on your belly, god bless you. My arms fall asleep.
If you actually remained stock still through those last couple paragraphs, fantastic. Great sport. You can relax now. For years I resisted the use of my phone. Social media apps would be periodically deleted and reinstalled based on my level of what I myself deemed “obsessive usage”. To this day, I do not have messenger. I have relaxed in many other ways, however. I use my phone to read digital books and comics pretty much every day, and I have allowed myself to fully indulge in snapchat at this point, though I am still wary my instagram usage for pretty much no reason at all.
The current state of things has given people time to reflect on our techno lifestyles. Most of us have lived this way for some years now, but it took the latest innovation in plague warfare to show many of us just how easy it would be forego physicality entirely and fully indulge the culture of cyberspace. While we continue the labor of working out our relationships to these striking technologies in spaces, it is important to consider that the “before”, the idyllic, pre-smartphone pastoralism of, say, the eighties, sixties, or eighteen-seventies, was also an aberration brought on the by innovative technologies of the day.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, a pleasantly accessible nonfiction title by Neil Postman, has a lot to say about modern man’s relationship with the various media technologies that have ruled his culture for centuries. One passage in particular is the source of this post. The author is talking about the physical demands of reading:
“You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency. The printing press makes rather stringent demands on our bodies as well as our minds.”
It should be noted that Postman published this book in 1985, a time when television culture dominated and the internet wasn’t a real thing for most of the population. Popular culture’s greater understanding of ADHD and the various disorders of anxiety have eliminated the descriptor “hyperkinetic” from our vocabularies, and we are less prone to calling out intellectual deficiencies when we see them. That idea of self-discipline, however, is one that still creeps about the darker caverns of the mind. Many of you still reading this are probably doing so in an attempt to fight back the gnawing terror of a more academic reading assignment. Reading more than a few snatches of academic writing is very difficult in 2020, possibly much more so than Postman ever could have imagined in 1985. Even as we spend vast amounts of time locked away in bedrooms amidst the coronavirus epidemic, attention for ungratifying things is a rare commodity.
Let’s drop the self-loathing for now and focus on that last line:
“The printing press makes rather stringent demands on our bodies as well as our minds.”
We don’t often consider how our machines dictate our physicality. Sometimes we will see an advertisement for a posture saving device like an adjustable table or an ergonomic chair and we are violently reminded of our own moment-to-moment positional habits. Now imagine how bodies were configured before the printing press, when books only existed among the powerful. Journalism did not exist. One could not disseminate ideas with anything more than the power of words. Maybe some families had a bible, or some towns an accessible library, but for the most part reading was not a staple of life before the fifteenth century.
Feudal peasants weren’t told to read lots of books or admonished for being unable to sit still except maybe on Sundays if they were church goers. With the introduction of print, the entire axis of culture changed. The way humans move around and physically spend their time changes. The commoners of the 19th and 20th centuries had to know how to read and communicate ideas intelligently to get by in increasingly interconnected ways of life. Now that print is declining and being replaced by liquid-crystal pictures and curt prose of electronic media, we are seeing the results another fundamental shift in the human configuration.
The transitional years are over. It happened right before our eyes. Children born today will know of the old ways only by the nostalgia that we feed to them. Is it good? Is it bad? It is life as it has always been, and as it has never been before. We can only hope that we reconfigure our lives with happiness and health for others in mind, and that those with power are willing to play ball.
This is all to say that you should not be entirely ashamed of your social media slouch. You are merely adopting the instinctual shape of an ape that has been asked to stare at a glowing screen for thirteen hours a day. The next time the reflection of your flabby arms, not-so-ivory enamel, or chin rolls bring you to the verge of tears, remember that you are participating in a process of modernization that began with some smartass realizing that putting fruit in the ground makes more fruit. Absurdity is human nature. You are experimenting with the latest craze in our ceaseless drive to adapt and socialize, and there is nothing insignificant about that.