Bobby sits at the bus stop, his Starsky and Hutch haircut looking sharp, his girls' pants tight and his smiley-face belt buckle matching yellow canvas shoes signed by all his BFF's.
He's looking on his laptop for guitar tabs to a song by My Chemical Romance. Tears fill his eye-shadow laden eyes, threatening to spill over like a bursting dam as he struggles in vain to find the song's lyrics.
Surrounding him, students mass together in a claustrophobic's hell, too close to breathe but in total isolation from each other because they preside over their laptops like cult members dancing around shrines to primeval gods who control the harvest season.
I think all this beloved technology that connects us to the world and makes it smaller is actually driving a wedge between us; it's making us less social.
I'm too old to grasp the darkness and depth of the average young person's preternatural ability to understand gadgets. I sometimes recoil in fear at the ease with which young people bend machines to their will, so perhaps the problem is all mine, and I need to accept that this is the direction the world is taking. After all, I think umbilical cords went fiber-optic in 1992.
Either way, it can hardly be disputed that technology has taken a place in our lives once occupied by something else - something a lot simpler - a thing called necessary human interaction.
No one doubts that technology is a colossal aid to education if used properly, and student use of technology is often scrutinized by various studies. Those studies usually aim to pick apart the amount of time students use technology for classroom work, either in class or out, and the amount of time they use it for frivolity and nonsense.
The Educause Center for Applied Research reported last year that 73.7 percent of college students surveyed - in a group of 27,864 students at 103 colleges and universities - are the proud owners of laptops. More than 98 percent of students own a computer of some kind. To be fair, most professors make it so a student can't get through school without one, so rather than find a campus computer every time you need one, it makes sense to have your own.
Almost all the students surveyed spend about 18 to 20 hours a week online, and few of them take their laptops to class. About seven percent of surveyed students admitted to spending more than twice that amount of time online, soaking up as many hours as a full-time job requires.
"In short, as students become more and more connected to each other through various online media, they're also becoming more untethered, with laptops and smart phones keeping them physically apart," said a report on these statistics by Insidehighered.com.
We don't need statistics to tell us most students are glued to their cell phones at all hours of the day, but I don't think that's a symptom or a cause of disconnectedness. Most of the time, we're talking to people we will meet later in person.
More than tearing us apart, cell phones often make it easier for people to connect personally.
I was a non-believer for years, not owning a cell phone until 2006, at the tender age of 30. I was a technological hold-out.
After a relatively short time, the memory of life without one is as distant as my past life in a French-Canadian monastery. Though cell phones become a fixture in our lives, I think a lot of us enjoy turning the infernal thing off now and then to keep the charlatans and the pious folk in our lives at bay.
With all the pompous, stuffed-shirts pushing political correctness in the world, we've suppressed our Freudian selves for too long. Some of you have never even learned to listen to it!
Make no mistake; this is bad news.
A creature lives inside us all - a creature that has little patience for the delicate sensibilities of the soft-hearted and who desires to stomp unabashedly in the gardens of its neighbors. The inner beast desires to be heard in a way it never can through an instant message.
So every time you see Bobby ignoring eight people while he waits for a response from one of his three Chinese pen pals, tell him to drop and give you 20. But, if Bobby is antisocial, weird and can't take a joke, maybe you better leave him alone.
Write to John at jrfrees@bsu.edu
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