Untitled (2014)

How I Wish
How I Were You Were Here

We're Just Two Lost Souls Living in a Fish Bowl
Year After Year

Runnin' 'Round on the Same Old Ground
Or Have We Found The Same Old Fears

Wish You Were Here...

-- Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here" (1975)

At times I wonder whether wireless communications and social media have not made longing obsolete, and that the sentiment is now reversed -- that we now more than ever wish those with whom we interact to Not Be Here, at least the here where we are now.

Photo image: Setagaya City, Tokyo Metropolitan District on 15 May 2014.
Photo credit: MTC

Dumbwalking, The Sequel

Culture & Technology



In a post on March 27 I suggested a new word --"dumbwalking" -- to describe the glacial and autistic walk of persons absorbed in interaction with their smart phones ("Smart Phones Make For Dumb Walks" being my explanatory epigram). I suggested at the time that the proliferation of smart phones would bring on the day when the Shibuya Crossing would fail to clear.

Guess what?

NTT DoCoMo has posted a video of the simulation of this exact scenario on its You Tube Channel. (Link - video - J)

The result: if the crowd of walkers are all operating smart phones, only 36% of them make it across in the 46 seconds they have between the light changes at the Shibuya Crossing.

Click on the link and watch the video. It is trip -- literally, in some cases.

One key variable, made clear at the 0:47 point of the simulation, is the speed at which dumbwalkers are presumed to perambulate. According to motion studies at the Aichi University of Technology, dumbwalking (the Japanese term is sumaho aruki) is an astonishing 20 times slower than normal walking.

So "glacial" is not hyperbole and one is not imagining things. Dumbwalkers really are moving so slowly they might as well be considered inanimate objects.

Takes the "mobile" right out of mobile telephony, doesn't it?

Dumbwalking

Pre-emptively, before I can even write a proper post about it, I would like to claim authorship of the name of a new social phenomenon -- some might call it a blight -- now making its appearance in this blessed land.

I call it "dumbwalking."

It is the glacial gait, with eyes and attention glued to the screen, of persons who are attempting to travel on foot while operating a smart phone.

Perhaps citizens of other lands where smart phones became items of mass consumption earlier than in Japan have their own words for it. If so I would love to hear about them.

One used to be able to make transfers through Tokyo, Shinjuku or Shibuya stations at a furious clip, with everyone else making minute adjustments to avoid collision with you. It would not be much -- a turn of an ankle, a slightly harder clutching to the breast of a package -- but everyone's mutual spatial awareness prevented impacts or blockages.

Now we have the dumbwalkers, meandering on their random, semi-catatonic, purblind courses amid the crowd. Blinded snails, they see neither where they are going nor the way anyone else is going.

"Smart phones make for dumb walks" I find myself saying over and over as each of these new technology-disabled pseudo-autistics impedes my forward, backward or anyward progress (yes, the aphorism is a modification of J.R.R Tokien's axiom in The Fellowship of the Ring of "Short cuts make for long delays" -- if ye be wanting to know).

With the ever greater use of smart phones and tablets, particularly by the more self-involved generations, I foresee a day -- and it will be soon -- when the famed Shibuya scramble crossing fails to clear.

Just Kidding

Because a national program to protect children from the dangers of the Web and mobile telephony is like soooooooo last week.

Fresh from a globe-girdling brouhaha over the prime minister's education revitalization panel's highlighting of the dangers that unsupervised use of Internet-enabled mobile telephones pose for elementary and middle school children, the ruling and opposition parties put aside their mutual disdain for one another yesterday (June 2) in order to agree to pass a bold new law...that will not create national standards for Internet content. In a non-partisan show of their mounting concern, the parties have agreed that third parties (corporate-NPO partnerships) -- and not the Government -- should craft recommendations for manufacturers on how to improve their technology for filtering the content of websites and text communications.

Furthermore, to demonstrate their determination to protect the children of Japan from the threats posed by the new communications technologies, the ruling and opposition parties agreed that the legislation mandate the installation of filtering software in all new communications and web access devices. It will also require that operators of servers comply with the development of means to prevent children from accessing sites deemed harmful.

Non-compliance with these new, strict regulations will carry no penalties, of course.

Sigh...

Could they have not at least waited a little while longer before showing their actual lack of concern regarding this latest inflated social crisis? There was hardly enough time for the television networks to put together the usual hailstorm of half-hour reports on the various ways the Internet is corrupting and killing people.

By agreeing to pass a toothless law just before the expiration of the Diet session, it is as though the entire political class were trying to establish new national standards for...blasé insincerity.