Our Invisible College

“Technology brings us together” is an often-touted argument of the modern age, yet we all know, deep down, that it is also, at best, only partially correct. I know from my travels that the phenomenon of people eating and drinking while staring at their devices in pubs or restaurants is rather oddly not yet considered universally rude. Once common, highly enjoyable, speculative debates over a meal get destroyed by someone whipping out a phone to use a search engine as the “deciding vote” despite the fact that they only retrieve someone else’s ideas. The irony in this transformation seems to have escaped most. In the UK we refer to this subculture of those technologically addicted as “phone zombies”, something that seems even more deeply appropriate when I try to cycle through busy streets without knocking them down