Shteyngart Checkmark Assignment

As much as I would like to be able to say that I am not like the technology-obsessed characters of Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story, I really am. My parents got me a smartphone in May for my graduation/birthday present, and in the brief three months that have passed, I have been becoming more and more reliant on my phone. I use it for just about everything: determining how long it will take me to walk somewhere, figuring out how to get somewhere, receiving emails; the list goes on and on. Sometimes I am even that annoying person walking around campus nearly running into things because I’m looking at my Facebook newsfeed instead of what’s in front of me. I can sympathize with Shteyngart, who describes his iPhone use in his article “Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer,” by saying, “The device became a frightening appendage to a life of already sizable anxiety. My phone became a reproving parent that constantly bade me to work harder, a needy lover that beeped and clanged and marimba’d her demands through the left-hand pocket of my jeans, a sadistic life coach constantly reminding me that, whatever I was doing, there were more fascinating things to be done.”

In Super Sad True Love Story, everyone has a device called an äppärät, which is somewhat similar to some of the technology that is available today, such as iPhones and Google Glass. They use this device to do pretty much anything, from calling a taxi, to looking someone up online, to checking financial data. The novel is supposed to be a satirical picture of what the future could look like with the problems that are going on in today’s society. But while readers of the novel might first be inclined to say that the äppärät is far-fetched and society will never end up like the dystopia described, our technology isn’t that far from the äppärät. Sure, you can’t scan a person with your iPhone and have it tell you everything about him, but you can find most people on Facebook, Twitter, or some other social media site. And with Google Glass, according to “Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer,” you can take pictures and videos of anything and anyone with very little effort. With either device, you can search the internet for virtually any information you want. I have used my smartphone to look up definitions of words, order pizza online, email, and much more. Even Shteyngart himself, according to “Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer,” uses an iPhone, an Android phone, and Google Glass on a daily basis. So while not every one of Shteyngart’s predictions in Super Sad True Love Story have come true, they are not as crazy as they seem at first glance.