After consulting my iPhone’s weather radar app, I take a quick trip over to a nearby deli to grab some diet ice tea drinks.   Figure I can get there and back again before the next wave of drizzle hits.   On the way back inside the Institute building, a young woman with her iPhone ear buds plugged into her head, is chatting loudly with…some disembodied somebody.     She is oblivious to everyone and everything around her, talking very loudly to the person at the other end of the digital network connection.   Did I not know about cell phones I might think her a lost crazy person talking to the voices inside her head.   In the lobby I walk quickly past her and to the stairwell down to my office, where I nearly collide with another co-worker whose eyes on fixed on the LCD display of his iPhone.

The trope is all our little computer devices are making us somehow less human, less able to interact with each other as humans beings.   And it’s a false one.   These devices don’t subtract from our human identity, they are a consequence of it.   We made these things, and then took a sudden passionate fondness for them, because we are what we are.   As a matter of fact, yes, millions of years of adaptive evolution made us into smart phone consumers.   It created us to eventually build the cell phone and text messaging and computer information technologies and online social forums just as surely as it put the color in our eyes.

Robert Ardrey, in his book African Genesis, took note of our species long preoccupation with weapons.   How long, he asked, would the first human have survived on the African plains, were they not born with a weapon in their hand?   Nothing, he said, in our long history has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of the weapon.   We are the species, he said, whose instinct is to kill with a weapon.   But we are something else besides, something probably even older then the weapon in our hands, something that had to have played just as critical if not an even more critical roll in our kind’s success on planet Earth, and to this day I’m surprised that a writer of all people didn’t see it too:   Language.   We are the species that talks.   We are a chattering breed.   And nothing in the long difficult history of the human kind has ever stopped the slow steady progression and refinement of human communication.

It is the nature of tools to change what they touch.   So the plow changed the earth, but also the farmer.   The mistake is thinking the plow made the farmer less human.   It made him more human.   It made him better at being the thing that millions of years of life on Earth created him to be.   And we are the species that talks.   We communicate with one another.   By whatever available means at hand, by whatever way gets it across the best, we will communicate.   It’s what we do.   It’s why there are libraries and opera and art galleries and weather radar apps.   So we refine our tools and so our tools refine us.   That inconsiderate moron in the restaurant babbling loudly into his cell phone hasn’t been dehumanized by the digital revolution.   Look at him.   He is simply obeying a very old and very ancient and powerful urge to communicate it…whatever it is…to someone.   Birds sing.   Humans babble away.   Smile kindly upon him, before you take that cell phone out of his hand and smack him over the head with it.