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The Bookery, the only independent bookstore in St. John’s has closed its doors.  It was one of those terrific squat little shops where you always came away with titles other than those you’d sought. Now the downtown of this booming burgh is without a place to buy new literature.  There’s nowhere to see a film either.

first Marconi, now this

At the same time, against the odds, CBC television has produced and is airing a brilliant new show, “Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays”.  (It’s the sort of show “Easy to Like” said the CBC, with its middlebrow branding, could no longer make.) Nobody is watching it.

“Numbers” are down all over.  Neither noisy 3-D extravaganzas nor small pictures for grown-ups got the audiences the film biz expected this year.  With the exception of “events” in Chimpanzee telly (a new Chimp to lead “Two and a Half Men” for instance) fewer people are glaring at the box.

What are they doing instead?  Are they in the sylvan hills gathering mushrooms? Opting to stay in bed for a morning fuck?  Perhaps they’re whittling or teaching themselves to play the harmonica?

No, they are watching and playing with their smart phones.  Where people once carted a pulp novel or a magazine along to wait for their Toyota to be serviced, or their flight to depart, they now have their phone. They can sort of read stuff, tweet and update their status (shouldn’t their status always be “updating my status”).  They can look to see whether a cheque has cleared.  They can survey the menu of a restaurant they are considering visiting.  They can read fudged and planted online reviews of the fare there.  They can play a game with blinking lights.  That is what they are doing.

They already vibrate, once they come fitted with a fleshy socket, smart phones will pretty much do it all.

On several occasions I have heard people say, with conviction, “I love my IPhone.”

I’m beginning to bore myself with my middle-aged prefacing of things, like “ten years ago …”.  “Ten years ago there was that little traffic you could have played street hockey on Kings Bridge on a Saturday morning.”

But who could have imagined, ten years ago, that people would be so engaged with, and entranced by, their phones.

Addendum

http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/10/14/lynn-coady-i-would-like-to-marry-my-smartphone/