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Mon 04 Apr 2007Phone texts send wrong messageTexting is either, as the postmodernists so rudely insist, just another cultural shift in which things dropping off one end of the trailer are supplanted at the other, or a defining moment when mankind's cleverality starts to eat its own foundations. I tend towards the latter view, believing that all technology usurps human capacity in exchange for convenience, writes John Waters.Most of us now have mobiles - some, I understand, several. Even we Luddites have succumbed to the attractions of pretending to work while sitting in a coffee shop "making some calls". We find mobiles useful for keeping track of our children and our lovers. But we are blind to what is lost in exchange for peace of mind, and what the "digital leash" does to human relationships. Does it sacrifice trust or emotional attachment for a false or exaggerated notion of contactability? Just as we can convince ourselves that we're working when we're sitting around gassing, do we convince ourselves that we're in contact with our children when, in truth, they are on a different planet? Literacy may be the least of the problems with this latest and increasing dependency. We hear much, as we did last week from the chief examiner of the Department of Education, about the damage to language and punctuation, but nothing about what mobiles do to human composure and intimacy. These aspects may yet prove far more serious.