Features and blogging

Have you seen it yet? It came to our house one Sunday night just after dinner. We settled in front of the telly after a lazy weekend that had seen us spending the usual insane amount of time on phones and computers. Just a normal Sunday.
The three of us took up our usual spots, plates of snacks within easy picking reach, phones too (just in case of any urgent WhatsApp cat videos). Five minutes in and those phones were cooling off on the side, ignored; we were hooked.
The Social Dilemma does this: takes your phone and places it on a high shelf with a wag of the finger. Okay, so we’ve all crept back in and sneaked them down again but we still got the message, we really did.
Mr Fairy took a smug stance, crowing “I Told You So” as his forgotten FB page grew dustier: I conceded he had a point, perfectly portrayed in this Sunday night chiller. No gore for this film, no heart-stopping, bunny-boiling, chain-sawing sickness – just some properly scary facts about how social media impacts the core of our very existence, and why it now taps into the furthermost areas of our brain. A proper horror flick.
It’s not often we reach a unanimous thumbs-up on films but this one scored an instant hat trick. Quite aside from all those real-life characters with funky job descriptions (“Inventor of the Infinite Scroll”), what the participants had to say caused instant debate among us, about how we were living our lives. This was uncomfortable but essential viewing for our family of hooked screeners. Even Mr F, who prides himself on having no interaction online, stopped checking his Strava routes and gave up Duolingo for an entire night. That’s what happens when cold facts are portrayed in an unsensational way – pragmatism is often the thing that chills us to the bone.
We closed down all notifications that very night. Of course by 10am next day, when I realised I had several unanswered work messages, half of them went back on. And of course the teen is already knee-deep in screen-world once more, but there are signs of change for all of us. Almost two weeks later, many of my apps and notifications are still dormant. Yes I still reach for the phone first thing, but screen-time is markedly down. We talk more and nag each other about picking up when we shouldn’t.
My son, whose world revolves entirely around computers, came up with immediate and clever ideas for modifying world usage of gadgets. Idealistic, but who knows? All the signs point towards him choosing ICT as a career, so perhaps he might actually work out a way to change the digital world without losing heaps of cash (the true crux of the film) – no pressure there, Joe.
Even so, I live in hope that with a few computer bods like him dotted about the place, we might scale down the Westworld of our current existence. We will have to wait and see: that’s if there’s time to wait and see.

NB Mr Fairy said: ‘Surely putting out a blog on this topic is a contradiction in terms? Maybe you could write to everyone, and get them to telephone you back?’
Yes we’re still married.