Do You Scroll and Stroll? A Reply to David Sexton

Illustration by Paul Dallimore: Evening Standard (05-11-13)

In an opinion piece entitled 'Do You Scroll and Stroll?' in yesterday's London Evening Standard, a writer by the name of David Sexton argues that due to an increased use of smart devices in public spaces a large number of people have become zombies or phone-drones and scroller trolls. 

Such individuals, he says, are no longer aware of others and only semi-conscious of their surroundings. They have become "little more than human obstacles" that "get in your way" and "collide with you without apology". This, he says, is both insulting and enraging. A form of digital solipsism that has rendered the "sense of shared purpose, of mutual respect in negotiating the daily friction of the city" null and void.

Such individuals, he says, are in "surrogate social worlds, at the expense of the real one."   

Now, all of this, is of course hysterical nonsense and ultimately a form of cheap and lazy journalism, written in an attempt, I suppose, to be amusing and provocative. Philosophically, clinging as it does to the fantasy of a real world, it's embarrassingly naive. But the cheapness, the laziness, the crassness and the naivety pale into insignificance before what follows: a misogynistic incitement to violence. 

For it turns out that Sexton's phone zombies are, "if the truth be told", mostly young women. And, because they are mostly young women caught up in their own "bubble world" of gossip, gaming and googling he is happy to fantasize their deaths beneath the wheels of tube trains and to encourage his readers to yell at girls who dare to use technology in public, or perhaps clap hands in their faces, click fingers, or hold arms out "as if directing idiot traffic". 

Indeed, due to the fact that the capital is such a busy place and - by implication - his is such a busy life - Mr Sexton goes still further and delights in the fact that you can see some men "choosing just not to get out of the way but to make sure they bump hard into the phone addicts walking into them". Indeed, some men "even deliberately try to knock the phones out of their users' hands". 

He admits that such verbal aggression and violent physical assault isn't "nice". But he justifies it on the grounds that a city such as London, full of busy men on important business like himself, "works only when there is mutual tolerance and respect between people sharing a packed public realm" and female phone zombies just don't understand this or give such. And thus these women had "better mind out" - !

Now, I know that the Evening Standard is a paper of such high quality that the publishers have literally to give it away, but, even so ... surely such a shameful article as this can't be acceptable, can it? Free speech is one thing: hate speech is another. 

And so, like Miss Zena McKeown who brought this piece to my attention, I can only call upon the Editor of the Standard, Sarah Sands, to issue some form of apology to all her female readers who have the audacity to carry smartphones and use other devices in Dave Sexton's world.