The alarm goes off in the early morning. I reach for my phone to turn off the alarm and can't help but check the weather. The screen fills with swirling snow and several 100% ❄❄❄❄ messages. I get up expecting the worst, but look out to this beautiful sunrise: no clouds, just gently lapping water on the lake. I check my phone again... yes, still snowing!
I'm British, I know their obsession with talking about the weather. But honestly, it isn't much to talk about. The temperature varies little from January to June, and sunshine is rare. Instead of real news, the weather is simply a polite topic to fill up the awkward gaps in a conversation, especially when anything remotely personal is out of the question. And I truly believe that any wish to watch the weather forecast on TV is simply an excuse to indulge in the slightly guilty pleasure of watching television.
Minnesotans take talking about the weather to a whole new level. Here we have extreme weather, that kills, strands and delays. This week is ironically Extreme Weather Awareness Week, which means there will be tornado drills, snow days and and preparation for flooding. So how do we prepare for this? We watch our phone screens and debate which outrageous prediction is likely to happen. We were told last week to expect a winter storm with 5 to 8 inches of snow in some places. That was countered with another warning of up to 30 inches. We discussed this at work and someone added they had heard 32 inches on the news. Odds were on school closing at least one day. I had students telling me the snow would start at 10:00 am. The tornado drill on Thursday was cancelled, and the pep rally moved forward, just in case... One weather man included a threat in his report that we should not listen to any other varying predictions to his. Another admitted that he couldn't possibly clarify the exact track of this epic storm. And it is true that after all this hype, the sun might still shine, and the rivers stay within their banks. We are asked to make a choice between believing our screens or the elements themselves. More often than not, we choose the electronic version, because it is simply more extreme and therefore more exciting.
This has become the norm for most of how we view the world, through our screens. And those who produce our social media and electronic news know of our appetite for the extreme. They cater to our cravings of the bizarre by offering us hoax after hoax after exaggeration after 'fake news'. We suspect that what we are viewing isn't real, but it is preferable to actual reality. We enjoy being appalled, shocked and disgusted. It makes us feel alive when we react, and we encourage aggressive responses because that must be better than doing nothing.
The two easiest apps to locate on my phone early in the morning before I'm truly awake, are WEATHER and SCREEN TIME below it. Today I have logged an hour, which is above my daily average. Although my hour of screen time is separated into the categories titled PRODUCTIVITY, READING, & CREATIVITY, most of it has been a waste of time, probably just checking the weather instead of walking outside into it. I won't be trashing my phone just yet, I still need it for the wake-up call alerting me to the fact that all of life is real and outside waiting for me to experience first hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment