Jennifer Horgan: Community is the biggest victim of our silent smartphone addiction

I had just put down the Cicero when we arrived at the port in Holyhead last Monday, on our way back from Liverpool. I left it in the car but it was percolating as we clambered on board to find seats.

The ferry needed to be re-fuelled so we were well into our third card game as the horizon started to change beyond the window.

I felt an instinctive panic when I noticed that my son was speaking louder than everyone else on board.

“What’s with all these aces!” he shouted at me. “Stop putting down so many aces!”

I was about to shush him when I realised he wasn’t actually shouting. It was just that the entire ferry was silent. There were people everywhere. And yet, bar the odd sneeze or cough, the boat held the collective energy of a graveyard.

Cicero. The ancient Roman rose up, like an apparition from the past, or at least from our car on the car deck, casting his judgement.

Cicero believes that there are two things that make us human: our search for truth and our desire for community.

What would Cicero make of us now, I thought to myself, scanning the silent souls around me, the boat beginning to shift and tug beneath us, carrying our muted shells of bodies out to sea.

How many passengers could be finding ‘truth’ on their individual devices? Or how many of them were being manipulated by algorithms into buying more stuff, believing more lies, and hating more people? How many were being drip-fed post-truth nonsense like a stupefying drug, without even registering it?

And what of our search for community? Nobody was talking to anybody else. There was no human interaction whatsoever, not even a passing flicker, no eye-contact being made with passers-by.

Cicero recognises the power of friendship too, believing a life without it is not worth living.

I paused our card game and, with a paper and pen, got up to survey the scene. There were exactly 37 people in our seating area. Nobody noticed me counting heads. Two of them were asleep. Every single other person was on their phone. Some had their hoods up, yet another shield from human connection. If I strained my ear, I could just about detect a very quiet tapping, prosthetic nails on glass, like insects on a window.

A few passengers had headphones in, some were big, car-wheel-sized, others had buds inserted in their ears. People sat in groups and alone. A father sat with his son in absolute silence, both of them lost in their screens.

I was reminded of an art exhibition I had just seen in Liverpool. The artist, Tim Spooner, had arranged ‘animals’ around the exhibition space and all around the gallery, up the stairs. They were just lumps of wool really but they were connected to pink wires and could move, appeared to be breathing. The people on the ferry looked the same. Robotic, other-worldly, twitching.

Then more ghosts arrived. Our family trips when I was a child in the 80s, those summer holidays to France, played out in front of me.

It was the one time of the year my dad dressed differently, swapped his work suits for canvas shoes and T-shirts.

I could see us in front of me, the six of us, sitting on the ferry, full of chat and excitement, arguing over our sweets or who got to go first in a game. None of this silence, this stasis.

A quick walk around the restaurant brought home the true extent of what’s happening to us as a species. Most media coverage of mobile phone addiction centres around young people.

The current buzz is about banning mobile phones in classrooms, an odd focus when schools ban phones in classrooms already.

And what will the new ‘banning’ look like? Are the police getting involved?

My trip around the ferry highlighted that screen addiction applies to every single one of us, no matter our age. The elderly were also on their phones.

The only saving grace was that two senior passengers were reading e-books. This plague is everywhere, absolutely everywhere.

And if our young learn by example, then we are doing everything to encourage them to spend their lives on screens. Our focus on children in schools is a distraction. Blame them, the voiceless, the wayward young, and we can carry on as before.

I went back to my seat. By now my husband had gone up a floor to sleep on one of those lounge chairs, preparing for the car journey on the other side.

Predictably, my son was on his phone. And just as predictably, I went on mine. I looked up statistics on mobile phone usage in Ireland. 79% of Irish people check their phones using public transport — a modest estimate by my count.

The phone offered me nothing by way of solutions so I went back to thinking about Cicero. Another thing he espouses is the importance of duty as well as rights. His political treatise, On the Republic, as explained by Bufacchi,“states that the primary reason for the public coming together to form a Republic is not weakness but a desire on the part of human beings to form communities.”

It’s possible that one of our most pressing duties now, alongside our need to fight populism, is to save one another from screen addiction and the manipulative, damaging impact of social media.

We need more mobile-free settings. We need to be forced to live healthier, connected lives — just as we’ve been forced in the past to stop smoking and to stop drink driving. As with any addiction, we need help.

How we do it, without seeming exclusionary or draconian or losing business, I have no idea. But if Cicero is right, we are slowly losing what it is that makes us human, and we are forgetting that we have a duty to the “maintenance of social order and communal life”.

At the end of our journey, my husband came back to us, refreshed from his sleep.

Besides a few trips to get snacks, and despite my worries, myself and my son had spent most of the journey on our phones, just like everyone else.