MYLDN 2191

The death of reality

I have found recently I am taking way less photographs on the street. I was starting to think maybe I was over it. That I had reached an artistic impasse and documented all I could document in this magnificent metropolis that is my home. Why wasn’t I feeling it anymore? And I realised eventually it was because everyone is on their phones all the time. So if you want to take pictures of people you have to now accept that if they are on their own, and even if they are not (and we will come to that) they will be glued to the tiny screen in the palm of their hands.

And the problem with that is that when people are on their phones they aren’t actually part of the world around them. They are somewhere else. You are ultimately capturing an absence of something rather than a presence of someone. They are ghosts in their own space. Temporarily admittedly but if its happening all the time to everyone then its not really temporary at all is it?

When I did my ‘death of conversation’ series back in 2014 I thought the biggest issue was that it was clearly becoming an obstacle to face to face conversation and people were superseding the person they were with in favour of their digital engagement. But now I think the biggest problem is that it is removing so many people from the reality around them you have to ask yourself who’s actually left?

Take this guy below who is an animal rights activist who has stood outside notting hill gate tube every saturday for the last 20 years. I have many shots of him taken during that long period of protest and always admired how he just stood there week in week out with his fixed face of outrage staring into the middle distance. And now even he is on his phone!

Now am I asking all these people to put away their phones just so I can get a decent shot? No, I mean, if I could maybe I would, but it is making documentation boring. And it’s also making living boring too. No-one’s engaged. Everyone’s elsewhere. It doesn’t exactly make for a riveting atmosphere. And this is the effect its having just on the street. Imagine the effect its having on nitelife. I mean if you’re out you don’t need to imagine, you’ve seen it with your own eyes, unless they were fixed on your phone obvs in which case probably not.

I mean, these people are at a gig but it sure as shit don’t look like it. Where are they? Anywhere but there is all we know for sure. Lost in a sea of dopamine hits. Jacked up on digital crack. As we all are. We are all utterly addicted. When I did the DOC series I didnt have a smartphone. It was just about doable then but it’s an impossibility now.
And just as I predicted I am as hooked as everyone else. But this is obviously not a coincidence. They have designed them to be as addictive as is technologically possible. It is woven into every single zero and one that make up the interface we gawp at for what is a global and eye bulging average of 5-6 hours a day.

So where’s this all heading? Well we are starting to finally cotton on that even though these devices facilitate our lives in a ton of different ways there is also a downside to our mental health and our attention spans which have essentially been destroyed. Especially amongst the young which is why they are currently trying to ban smartphones for the under 16s.Some countries have already done this. And well they should. The research is in. It fucks up developing minds (not the scientific term they used in the peer reviewed paper I’m sure but you get the gist).

So what do the rest of us do? Well we try our damned hardest to keep our mitts and our eyeballs off them as much as we possibly can. Engage more in life. Be present. Read a book. Chat to a stranger. Have a daydream. Stare into space. Do nothing. If we fill every single moment of downtime with our phones we are keeping our brains in a permanently activated state so it learns never to stand down. It is always on high alert. We have to weave more moments of nothingness into our day. I saw a poster for a book called “The art of doing nothing” by Veronique Vienne and its about how we need to focus more on being rather than doing.

Maybe we know all this shit already and it isn’t really news but we have to actively work our arses off to override this tech dependent existence or we will be consumed by the black holes of our own algorithms and the real world will disappear into a thin mist floating around our Matrix existence unable to penetrate to any meaningful degree.