Picture Wednesday – Are We All Disconnected?
We check mobiles hundreds of times per day, even while we are talking to others. That is plain bad manners, similar to not acknowledging someone else when entering a room. However, it’s become so common place that I have started to consider this nomophobia a bit more leniently. Still, I don’t know if it is a good thing or not. It does bother me when people check their phone in the middle of a conversation.
The street artist Zabou seems to have translated all this into a great mural in North London. The characters in the paint below seem to be melting away together with their mobile phones. Its location, a quiet back street, might actually be saying something too. Something like ‘this happens everywhere’.
For those who don’t know Zabou, she’s even given a Ted talk, where she advocated the benefits of street art in community regeneration.
Ala Niz painted a portrait of the artist, which is not too far away from this one. Check it out!
Thanks for checking!
A Londoner from Afar
Love the mural and thought process going on here. I actually wrote a piece on the exact same topic, too:
https://germanamericanabroad.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/on-cell-phone-addiction-and-the-moments-app/
Thanks for your comment! It’s interesting to see how we use this piece of technology, as if it’d free us from doing what’s good or right.
Hi!
It’s always pleasant to find like-minded people having the same “worries” although living in 3 different countries.
I wrote on the same topic if you two are interested: https://toolazyforpenandpaper.wordpress.com/2015/03/18/sorry-what-were-you-saying/
Sure. Thanks for your comment. I guess there’ll be a few of us who have started to feel in a similar way.
I think it’s a good or bad thing depending on the person and their views. I think technology can isolate people and distort their reality. However it also brings people together all over the world and some social media campaigns have allowed people to rally behind a cause or helped them to feel like they have a community out there and they aren’t alone. So with everything there is extreme and excess but there are benefits. Just don’t let it control you and I think you’re fine.
Agreed. The difficulty here is that it can be easy to become obsessed by checking phone notifications and the like.