The amount of active mobile devices on our planet is somewhere near 7.22 billion. That means our world has 7.22 billion portals.
As the text reads, "In their phones were antennas, and these antennas sniffed out an invisible world, as if by magic, a world that was all around them, and also nowhere, transporting them to places distant and near, and to places that had never been and never would be." (39)
The reader could replace the word "phones" with "houses" and "antennas" with "doors," and the sentence would make just as much sense. Nadia and Saeed used their technology to bring them an escape when the doors couldn't.
We live in a world where we can place VR glasses on our head, transporting us to places far from our own. We can comment on people's Instagram photos from halfway across the world.
When I was in South America, I spent two weeks living with an indigenous family. The houses were made of concrete, the floors of dirt. They spoke Quichua and not Spanish. Only one mud road ran through their village, nearly isolating them from the rest of the country. My teacher brought out her laptop one night at dinner, playing them an episode of Planet Earth. The family of 7 crowded around the screen, ooing and ahing -- ignoring us for the rest of the night.
It was as if they had just stepped through one of the black doors.
This is a very cool comparison, I agree that we all have our own little doors in our pockets at all time. In it's own way it is as if the author was trying to make this book fictionary with the doors but made the connection to the phones knowing that it is factual we all have some sort of escape.
ReplyDeleteWhat a creative way to think about how we engage with technology. Escapism is so readily available but I'm glad you didn't demonize it.
ReplyDeleteI love the way that you interpreted how VR works. It was interesting how you interpreted the scenario in First Person point of view. It is true that it makes it feel as though we stepped through the door once we put our VR headset on
ReplyDeleteJane, I love your interpretation of this quote and how you transformed it into another concept that was also discussed in the book. I agree that technology completely changes people, making them focus on things and be able to connect to those and what they weren't previously able to. This is a blessing and a curse, for it gives us a connection that is unimaginable, but it also causes us to become distant at the same time, seemingly elsewhere while we are engaged in technology.
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