Checkmark assignment 1

I’ll never forget the cold, creeping sensation that overcame my body when I reached into my backpack, expecting to strike the comforting metal rectangle that is my iPhone 4S, and coming up empty. Even more horrifying than realizing I’d lost my constant companion, never more than 10 feet away from my body at all times, was the realization of how immediately my life became drastically different. My phone turned up the next day, but I must admit that those 24 hours without my 4.8-ounce best friend made me feel like I was living without my right hand. In the process of writing this paragraph alone, I’ve used my phone to listen to music, send two text messages, check my Instagram and Facebook accounts, and look at the weather for tomorrow.

However, my obsession with my phone and my need to constantly feel connected is not mine alone. In fact, according to author Gary Shteyngart, we’ve only just hit the tip of the technological iceberg. In his novel Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart explores a mildly dystopian America in which its vain, morally bankrupt citizens virtually cease to function without their apparat. The device, not unlike our smart phones in many ways, is a pebble-shaped constant stream of holographic data and information that is worn around the neck. During one of the more disturbing passages of the book, protagonist Lenny Abramov is at a bar with his friends when hell breaks loose in Central Park. The Lower Net Worth Individuals (“LNWIs”) engage in a deathly riot against the National Guard and immediately everyone begins streaming the attacks over their apparati. One of Lenny’s friends, Amy Greenberg, best displays the overall narcissistic, distorted mentality of society during this time period, as well as their obsession with never being disconnected from the Internet when she gives a live podcast of the event over her apparat: “‘Eighteen people dead… National Guard just shooting everyone, smashing up their little shacks, and I am so glad my man Noah Weinberg is right over my shoulder… I don’t know how you can go out with a fat loser like me’” (Shteyngart 160). When the book was published in 2010 such devices seemed more like a satiric hyperbole of our current technology use, and not a realistic prediction of the future. However, in the just three and a half short years since the novel’s publication, our use of and capabilities with technology have already grown immensely.

In August 2013 Shteyngart published an article on the website The New Yorker called “O.K., Glass: Confessions of a Google Glass Explorer” about the most recent innovation in technology, Google Glass. These glasses stream data in a pink rectangle in front of the wearer’s line of vision, which to the user appears to be a “twenty-five-inch television screen floating some eight feet away.” The similarities between Google Glass and the apparat are obvious and eerie. While the specific year in which Super Sad True Love Story is set is not disclosed, one can infer that it is meant to be in the not-so-distant future. In the article, Shteyngart writes “setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.” In other words, change is happening so quickly that it would not be entirely unrealistic for the novel to take place less than ten years in the future. 

The development of Google Glass among other recent technological innovations and the incessant need that more and more of us feel to be constantly connected to multiple news outlets and social media sites force me to reach the less-than-pleasant conclusion that our reliance on technology will only continue to cultivate. 

Lindsey Walker