The animated family conversation was becoming louder, and Archimedes anxiously began to look for signs that it was disturbing the other passengers. He needn’t have worried. On a Melbourne tram which was two-thirds full, almost all were staring into space, plugged into their iPods.
That was when it first struck Archimedes that a gap had opened between him and many of his fellow travellers in urban Australian society. While he still lived mainly on planet Earth, they seemed to be spending increasing amounts of time inhabiting an electronic world.
Not only were most of the people on the tram plugged into sound systems, so were many cyclists and joggers he could see from the window. In some of the passing cars, flickering screens displayed DVDs for the passengers. And then there were the people on the pavement yelling and gesticulating at someone totally invisible—on the other end of a mobile phone. What had happened to looking at scenery or the passing human parade, to listening to the city’s hum or birds singing, and to thinking one’s own thoughts uninterrupted?
This disappearance of people into an electronic world is starting to feed back into the “real” world in a big way, and not all the impacts are positive. A simple example; the sense of hearing presumably evolved in part as a system to warn of approaching danger. In urban traffic, blocking that sense with an iPod, as joggers and cyclists regularly do, could be a fatal mistake.
And in addition to the long-term concern about using mobile phones while driving, road safety researchers are now becoming increasingly worried over the distraction caused by the growing numbers of electronic gadgets in vehicles—satellite navigation devices, alarms to alert drivers to potential collisions or other emergencies, and screens displaying the position of other vehicles or the condition of the road or vehicle. All these compete for attention and tend to draw the driver’s concentration away from the road ahead.
There are bizarre stories from the world of internet gaming. Multiplayer role-playing games, such as Second Life, Everquest and World of Warcraft, allow people to inhabit electronic worlds where they can live vicariously as characters far different from their everyday lives. There are reports of some who spend more time in these electronic fantasy worlds than they do in the real one.
The real-world trade in the electronic characters, skills and possessions acquired in these cyberworlds