When We Become “Remote”: Smartphones and Anti-Communion
When we are no longer present to our most immediate world, as when we enter a ‘text-space’ that casts aside the ‘human-space’ of human encounters, we have chosen anti-communion. We have broken with ‘now’ and placed our conscious selves into a false transcendence. We have become “remote” — both verb and noun, a living gerund. People living as if we were living — a quiet hardness of heart that apocalypse, in its original sense of “unveiling,” now exposes in us.
I wonder aloud in a moment of escatological whimsy — has the smartphone become a horse of the Apocalypse, as in Huawei’s sculpture above, made from thousands of discarded broken conversations?
Do Our Devices Help Us Commune, or Foster Anti-Communion?
Do these mobile devices help our mobility, by definition helping us move with purpose? Do they help us commune? Or rather, do they tend to foster “anti-communion” and anti-eucharist?
There is no true sharing when the people (and the natural world) closest to us have been forced into the background of noise. The primary is discarded in lieu of a more abstract and distant secondary encounter. The outstretched hand shrivels. The thumbs grow. The order of being and ourselves in it becomes distorted. An inordinacy reigns as normative. And still our heart pines for the divine transcendence that only Christ can give. We feel incomplete, unable to find true fulfillment, and we feel sick before the growing chasm.
The Apocalypse begins here — in the disorder of our creation. Pope Francis has written on this same danger of technology displacing real human encounter; see his message “From Social Network Communities to the Human Community”.
A Mobile Made of Mobiles
If the noise of our devices can become a kind of apocalypse, the answer is not to flee the world but to return to presence — to the “now” where Christ waits for us. See Silence Is Key for Eucharistic Adoration for how that presence is restored before the Blessed Sacrament.