Fed up with watching your friends glued to a smartphone at the dinner table, or your girlfriend or boyfriend seemingly more interested in updating their Facebook status than you? A new movement called “Lift up your head, look at me” (抬頭, 看我) has recently prompted heated online discussion.
Netizen Tsai A-ka (蔡阿嘎), who has produced two short video clips in reaction to current social events, appeared in a recent mineral water commercial and a music video to promote the movement, urging more focus on person-to-person interaction amid the rapid expansion of the “heads-down tribe” (低頭族) — a term that doctors and researchers in Taiwan have adopted to describe smartphone addicts who are increasingly susceptible to traffic accidents, physical illness or feelings of psychological isolation.
Since being uploaded to YouTube on May 19, the clips have been watched about 700,000 times.
Photo: courtesy of a student surnamed Chen
“I am a smartphone user, but never an Internet addict. There are no game applications on my cellphone, which I only use to access the Internet when I am waiting for someone and get bored,” Tsai said.
An increasing number of people are becoming smartphone addicts, a trend that appears to be more prevalent in the north of the country than the south, the online celebrity said.
“What bothers me most is how people mouth platitudes when a group of friends get together before returning to their mobile phones. If this situation continues, such people are going to find they have no friends,” Tsai said.
In addition to the novel social campaign, college students across the country are being encouraged to play a new game called Phone Stack, which seeks to address the issue of social rudeness.
Invented by a Californian who became annoyed at the ubiquitous nature of improper dinner etiquette, the game requires participants meeting in a restaurant or other public venue to place their cellphones facedown in the center of the table and not to touch them until the event ends.
The first person to reach for their cellphone has to pay the bill.
National University of Tainan student Chen Wei (陳蔚), who has taken part in such events, said she came away with a good impression because people were more engaging and open to conversation when forced to put away their mobile phones.
Chen said smartphone addicts are commonplace at restaurants and as soon as one person picks up their cellphone, everyone else at the same table simply follows suit.
“To be honest, [most people] just slide their fingers across the screens when there isn’t much going on,” Chen said, adding that she planned to hold a Phone Stack activity of her own if she can find the time.
A student from Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Hsiao Shou-cheng (蕭守成), also applauded such events.
Hsiao said that he had played the restaurant game about three times and found everyone taking part to be surprisingly cooperative and having fun.
“It takes intelligence to use a smartphone,” said Taiwanese cartoonist Ron Chu (朱德庸), who, despite being a smartphone user, rejects becoming too reliant on such technology.
“We are the masters of the mobile phone, not the other way around,” Chu said.
As a popular Chinese-language cartoonist, Chu said his old cellphone, which he used for seven years, had only three functions; making and receiving telephone calls, and sending text messages.
The 51-year-old said he only bought a smartphone after -opening an account on Sina’s Weibo microblogging site and on Facebook, and he did so to be better able to photograph and share his latest works with fans online.
“To my mind, mobile phones and computers are the two inventions most likely to diminish our humanity and promote indifference to human life,” Chu said, bemoaning how Asians appear particularly susceptible to the slavish pursuit of material goods.
Elaborating on how technology has adversely affected social interaction, Chu said that he once saw a group of people sitting at a dining table who were all too preoccupied with taking pictures of their food to actually talk to each other.
“That situation just seemed absurd to me. Why not just arrange an online gathering?” he asked.
While mobile phones provide an array of functions, their complexity is an interesting corollary to the greed of human beings, who invariably want more than they need, Chu said.
The expansion of the “heads-down tribe” was the result of a business conspiracy, he said, adding that telecoms companies are forcing the latest technology on customers as a way of encouraging them to develop the same set of values.
Political commentator Nan Fang Shuo (南方朔), who decided to return to writing with a pen after reluctantly using but loathing computers for three years, also criticized the imposition of modern technology.
He said that computers were beneficial only to people doing business or in education, but were not particularly useful when it comes to accessing information.
“Obtaining information is not the same thing as acquiring knowledge, especially when the Internet and mobile phones are filled with a plethora of meaningless data. What good can possibly come from flooding one’s mind with all that rubbish?” he asked.
Citing research done in Denmark, Nan Fang Shuo said that cellphone use only serves to intensify the social phenomenon of “small social networks,” because mobile phone users are inclined to call only a limited group of friends and become more short-tempered when communicating with people outside that circle.
According to University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein in his best-selling book, Republic.com, the Internet enhances the human tendency toward -being anti-social and tends to gather people together in small groups, Nan Fang Shuo said.
“Despite the unlimited choices the Internet has to offer, people only narrowly filter the information they receive,” Nan Fang Shuo quoted Sunstein as saying.
The political commentator also dismissed the widespread idea that the Arab Spring would not have succeeded without Facebook.
“Public anger against the rulers of those countries had been building for some time and was bound to erupt even without the Internet,” Nan Fang Shuo said.
Additional reporting by Chen Yi-ching and Hsieh Wen-hua
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