Tiny Frozen Hands and Screen-Time Scares

I went to the dentist yesterday. I was supposed to be getting a chipped wisdom tooth out. I had soup ready for dinner and everything. It was not to be. Apparently, I need some x-rays first.

I’m told there’s a long process ahead. First, I need to wait for a letter to book an appointment to get said x-ray. Then, I’ll need to book for the tooth extraction (again). According to the dentist, it will probably be another year until they actually get rid of the thing. Good thing I’m not in any pain.

On the public transit home, I saw this child - a baby, really, no older than two - in a pram using a smartphone. They weren’t just holding the thing, but seemed to know their way around a phone.

I know full well that it’s none of my business what this kid’s mother thought about their child being a touchscreen virtuoso. But I can’t lie, the visual was a little uncanny. I thought, this little guy will never know how it feels not to be tethered to a device.

It reminded me of an article I read recently. The piece claimed that 40% of UK three-to-five-year-olds use social media. I wonder if they’re counting platforms like YouTube as social media in that statistic. Still, it blows my mind. See also: the fact that nearly half of UK kids outright own a smartphone.

Yeah, yeah, smartphone bad. You’ve heard this song and dance before, right? Who cares? It’s not like I have or want kids anyway.

I sound like my mother when I pearl-clutch over tech like this. She told me I’d get square eyes from sitting too close to the television. Do modern parents tell children their eyes will go oblong looking at their phones all day? Probably not.

I remember seeing this cartoon in a newspaper years ago. It showed a boy walking down the street playing a Game Boy video game console. The boy is so absorbed in whatever he’s playing, that he doesn’t notice he’s about to fall into an open man-hole. The comic strips implication was that late-90s tech is so addictive that young people don’t even see the world around them anymore.

It’s funny to think about now, but people forget there was genuine moral panic about devices as simple as handheld video game consoles and early cell phones. Critics even thought that textspeak (also known as “SMS language or txtng) - those silly abbreviations millennials used to save time and characters (because texting paragraphs used to be freaking expensive) - was destroying literacy, and being used to hide our evil deeds from parents.

Go further back and it’s hard not to feel like societal fears surrounding technology are always changing while also staying the same.

I’m reminded here of a short story by horror author Robert Aickman, called ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen.’ In the story, which was published in the early 1950s, a technophobe contends with a rotary phone that seems to be acting strangely. Over time, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the device, especially following a phone call from a mysterious woman named Nera.

In the end, the protagonist becomes so consumed with his phone that every other aspect of his life deteriorates. He loses his job, forgets to clean and feed himself and becomes a full-blown telephone ‘junkie.’

Because it’s a horror story, there are paranormal explanations at play. Nonetheless, Aickman’s intended symbolism is clear: the landline telephone is a social sickness that will lead to our decline.

If he only knew what was in store.

Today, someone using something as primitive as a house phone would probably define themselves as a kind of analogue minimalist. Likewise, if you use a feature phone or an MP3 player, then you might as well live in a cabin in the woods as far as some are concerned. I’m sure one day, we’ll look back at smartphones and talk of how much simpler life used to be before the internet was stapled onto our faces. It’s funny how novelty bias works like that.

So we should just embrace technology then, right? I’m not so sure. I think that maybe, regardless of what era you find yourself in, you can have too much of a good thing. Whether you’re sitting too close to a CRT television, spending hours waiting on a call, or your tiny hands are struggling to grip onto a touchscreen, we all need some time away from our devices.