Mobile Moods and Madness - the Virtual Drama on our City Streets

Watch out- there is mobile drama on the streets...

I think I must suffer from generational self-consciousness. It’s not that I mind gesticulating wildly to illustrate a point to a group of people or even twisting my face into a variety of visual exercises to emphasise the message. However, I draw the line when it comes to a phone call, particularly on a mobile and in a public place.

However, as I navigate the pavements of the City, less crowded than before Covid as they may be, I continue to dodge people engrossed in fully animated rants, disputes or gossip exchanges on their mobiles. The risk of human collision, or hold-up as people randomly come to a sudden halt to better absorb some phone-fed comment, is an issue. And there are those whose joyous, hilarious exchange of news and views, mostly stripped of any meaning to the rest of the grey world around them, causes unnerving changes in speed and direction.

Yet more annoying from a navigational perspective are those people who insist on not just speaking but using the camera function while continuing to walk along. This is a recipe for disaster as not only do these individuals have their minds elsewhere, but with their eyes distracted they force sudden evasive action on the other users of the pavement.

There was a time when the sight of a person walking around talking animatedly to themselves was a sign of a mental health issue. The Victorians might well have hurried such people off to Bedlam. Today, it is a commonplace occurrence, a consequence of the mobile phone and the air-pod. People wandering about wrapped up in parallel lives, feet on the pavement, mind deep in discourse, have become part of our modern cityscape. These shards of shared lives, snippets of emotion or disjointed remarks, loudly broadcast, can nevertheless bring momentary flashes of drama to our streets.

Just recently I was captivated by a youngish woman engaged in an angry mobile phone exchange, wildly waving arms, rolling eyes, shaking her body and unleashing her inner fury in a multitude of visible ways all lost on her invisible and unseeing counterpart. This impressive tirade, worthy of an Oscar, made for a strange, but briefly captivating public performance.

Here was a disembodied part of the script of a real-life drama stripped of context, and all the other dialogue missing. The world hurried past oblivious, indifferent, uncaring, not involved. Perhaps some modern creative genius will pick up these broken fragments of dialogue to stitch them into a dystopian drama of modern dysfunctional life.

Of course, such very public displays of emotion, words and thought are probably just a phenomenon of the big city and busy streets. To launch into an apoplectic vocal rage on the phone while standing in the centre of a small village, is a recipe for social exclusion, much gossip and bad karma all round. Perhaps the drama of these performances is linked to the relative anonymity of the big city.

For 2023 I will continue to eschew even the wire connected earpiece, and still clamp my mobile to my ear - inconvenient though this might be. I must acknowledge that this is partly in the hope of appearing less ridiculous to myself, and I will uphold my aim of remaining excruciatingly dull if briefly on the phone in public. But then I come from a generation where phones were static devices in a corner of the house, hard wired into a crackly network. To the rest of you, just bring on the mobile drama, but please look where you are going….

Tim Skeet

New Year 2023