Ah, the
family dinner table. We’re all familiar with it: Dad is relaxing after a long
day in the office, listening to the youngest, Tommy, excitedly explaining
exactly how much better he is than James at football. Meanwhile, Katie is
helping mum set the table, asking for help to decide what she should wear to
college tomorrow. But wait… Something isn’t right. Dad has yet again taken his
work home with emails pinging-in every 3 minutes. Tommy is enthralled by the
high score he’s aiming for in Doodle Jump. Mum is wiping the floor with Debbie
from next door in a round of Words with Friends. And Katie is in fact
live-tweeting how her meal is going, just to make sure the whole world is aware
that she had carrots and peas
with her chicken (“and it actually tasted better than expected – Go Mum!”). The
picture of the contemporary family at dinner is somewhat over-crowded;
everywhere you go you bring your plus one: your smartphone. But is it actually
such an unusual sight? Or is the idyllic family dinner-table-scene just a
reliable fantasy we pretend we could fulfil, if we weren’t so busy and
important.
It feels like meal times have been overrun by instagrammed pictures of
soup, updated diet logs, and letting your friends know that, unfortunately, you
have once again succumbed to an avocado and prawn salad. Nowadays, we literally
have the world at our fingertips, able to instantly find out krazygurl23 from
Idunno, Nebraska thought that Jennifer Lawrence’s tumble made for a
“#greatOscarsmoment”, or that workoutguy247 feels like he’s over done it this
time, “#tired #gym”. Smartphones have become the friends we never knew we
needed, but somehow always wanted. Siri doesn’t give you directions with your
wife’s quiet smugness; your Samsung Galaxy doesn’t mind if this time you just
Google it; and your HTC will never chip in with their opinion on your Facebook
status, agreeing that you probably shouldn’t have had that extra slice of
cheesecake, “#yolo”.
But before
smartphones it was TV-dinners on our laps, and before that, newspapers and
‘novels’. As a child in restaurants I used to love colouring in the pictures that
would appear in front of me before the meal was served. Didn’t we all?
Fine, Homo Sapiens might
be ‘social creatures,’ but sometimes other people are really boring. Maybe we
do actually need mental stimulation from elsewhere. We all like to pretend that
we’d be great at conversation if we could be bothered, but we can’t, so we
won’t try. But is that really the case? Are we as interesting as we think
we are? Smartphones aren’t necessarily our foe; they’re just another
colouring-in book to distract us from the monotony of everyday life.
We might
think it’s rude and antisocial to use our phones at the dinner table, but this
dream world we've concocted of the perfect family sitting around,
laughing and enjoying themselves is just that, a dream world. If anything, the
smartphones may have made us more sociable.
We might not be talking to the person next to us, but we are talking,
and it’s to the entire world. In the past, mum and Debbie from next door
probably just swapped a cursory “hello” over the fence, now they’re battling
minds in word games, so although nowadays complaints ring up that we don’t chat
around the dinner table anymore, I’ve got to ask the question, did we ever?
Is this the photo of the modern family? (N.B. This has not been instagrammed for your viewing pleasure)
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