The Madness of: Smartphone Addiction, Celebrity Gossip

Raving Madness
Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700)
Photo Credit: Bethlem Museum of the Mind [CC BY-NC] 

 [Michael] Cera is 35 and must be one of the few millennials not to own a smartphone. What does he do when he has a spare 30 seconds and needs to save himself from boredom?

"I don't know. Sometimes I'll just be bored."

He laughs, as if it's no big deal. It gives him space to process things, he says.

Does he look at the rest of us, staring into our phones, and feel sorry for us? He isn't judgemental but says:

"I feel sorry for my son, I feel sorry for the world. I think it's getting very lonely."

Sometimes he will do a head count on the subway of "how many people are looking at their phones and it makes me feel lonely. Even being with friends or with family, you're with somebody you love and haven't seen in a while, and they're with their phone. It's like they left the room. I think it bums a lot of people out, honestly. I feel the loneliness creeping in."

I wouldn't know how to survive, I say. Cera looks wise.

"That's the triumph of the Apple corporation. It has done a good job of making people feel they can't exist without its product."...

(Emine Saner, The Guardian, 2023)

 

Celebrity Gossip

The First Madness of Ophelia
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1872)
Photo Credit: Gallery Oldham [CC BY-NC-ND]

According to Google's news search, the media has run more than 10,000 stories this year about Philip Schofield, the television presenter who resigned over an affair with a younger colleague. Google also records a global total of five news stories about a scientific paper published last week, showing that the chances of simultaneous crop losses in the world's major growing regions, caused by climate breakdown, appear to have been dangerously underestimated. In mediaworld, a place that should never be confused with the real world, celebrity gossip is thousands of times more important than existential risk...

(George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2023)