When walking down the street, I find it hard to meet someone’s gaze as they pass right by me. Usually, their eyes are fixated on their phone screen, waiting for the latest tweet, Instagram post, or Facebook message, but I am no different from them either. We are present in the sense that our body is here, walking down the same street, but our minds are someplace else, detached from our current surroundings. Today’s society has been infested with technological zombies, bringing a new kind of apocalypse; one where the world is not coming to an end, but the simplicity of both human interaction and everyday life activities most certainly are.
Since the rise of the smartphone, social skills have gone downhill. Humans don’t even interact with fellow humans anymore. While waiting for the bus, we might pull out our phones to see what’s the latest in pop culture instead of turning to the person beside us and talking about what a beautiful day it has been. Technological zombies are unaware of the world moving on unceasingly without us. We slowly trek through the motions of life, hungry for whatever notification will pop up on our phone screen rather than brains. Once we decide to take so much as a glance back up to the world, we suddenly realize we have missed our bus. One might be able to theorize that the rise of technological zombies is due to the creation of the smartphone. Prior to that, it was very rare that you would spot someone, walking down the street with their head bowed and their eyes glued to their flip phone screen. Flip phones were used for the simplest tasks like actually just calling up a friend, sending a quick text, or taking the occasional picture here and there.
Social media also plays a significant part in the rise of technological zombies. We all search for some kind of validation online that who we are as a person appeases society’s idea of perfection when we can only find that validation within ourselves. We take selfies instead of the beautiful scenery in front of us, we take pictures of our materialistic items and hope we can get at least one hundred likes on it, we even take pictures of our food platters. When a conflict arises, our first instinct is to take out our phone and record it instead of calling 911. When a person is in trouble, we crowd around them with our phone cameras right in their faces, not even bothering to lend a helping hand. This is what society has become, and nearly each and every one of us is unfortunate enough to admit we are casualties of this technological zombie apocalypse.
Zombies eat brains, but we don’t use our brains anymore. Due to the possession of smartphones, we don’t need to either. If we need to know the definition of a word, we will Google it instead of searching for the nearest dictionary. If we need to solve a simple mathematical problem, a calculator is always accessible on our phone as well. Technological zombies are everywhere, even on the roadways. You can spot the worst of us, texting while driving, swerving into the opposite side of the road as if whatever we are typing is so important that we would jeopardize our own life and others’. It’s as if life is not valued enough when a phone is in our hand. We may not know this, but there is a whole world around us, moving and moving fast. Time is precious, and we would rather waste away like a dead corpse, confined by the excessive use of our smartphones when there is so much more out there to do, see, and experience. Technological zombies, I hope we can all come back to life before it’s too late and we wake up someday with the bitter realization that the time we have spent on our phones is time we will never get back; time we could have spent, living the life we were given to the best of our capability.
