iWorld

Brian, the talking dog from the surprisingly-witty Family Guy, walks into a bar where he chats up a hot young girl. This 1990s born bird is flirting while simultaneously playing with her iPhone, until randomly suggesting sex in the toilette, never removing her bored eyes from the cellular machine.

This ridiculously realistic scenario is now taking place everywhere I look: from colleagues supposedly doing their job while trying to beat a score on some overly noisy game on their iPod Touch, to friends checking the latest bid on ebay – while their conversation companions (i.e. people who do not own an iMachine) are trying to get their attention over an intimate drink in the local pub, to my ex-boyfriend lazily laid on the hotel room sofa, obsessively checking the Arsenal score, while your humble servant is desperately trying to convince him to finally get out of the hotel room – during the late afternoon hours of our supposedly romantic getaway weekend.

Clearly the sanctity of conversation (not to mention intimacy) is forever lost thanks to this western society’s antisocial time-killing wonder.

Now imagine those scenarios again, but replace the iAccessory with a book. I would love to see my boss’s reaction to my X-raying commercial cargo while reading a book, or my date’s facial expression as I open this innocent book of mine while he’s checking out the menu or speaking to the waitress. After all, wherever an iToy is applicable, why wouldn’t a good old harmless book be in place?

But what bugs me the most is the fact that an extreme antisocial like myself can see the acute impoliteness of it, whereas the so-called social people around me cannot. Now where’s the sense in that?