I climb out of bed and head to the living room. Silence. The family are already up and settled: earphones inserted, curled up separately, clasping their personal rectangles and gazing intently downwards, smirking or just staring. A quick glance upwards from one of them cursorily acknowledges my entrance.
Occasionally one of them will get up and wander to and from the bedroom, still plugged in, still clasping, eyes fixed: like a patient hooked up to a trolley with an IV drip.
To paraphrase Thom Yorke, if there were aliens hovering above taking home movies for the folks back home, they would observe us in our natural habitat and believe they had found the 21st Century Human Family At Play.
This, be reassured, will not be a rant about how technology is ruining our lives. That is a well-trodden path. It would be supremely disingenuous for me to knee-jerk into righteous condemnation of the tech in our home lives when it has in fact been a Great Enabler.
After all, how can I argue against science? The genome sequence of 21st Century family communication has been decoded and reveals itself thus: s–ky–pewh–atsa—ppf–acet–imevi–ber.
Indisputably, internet-driven technology has made the world smaller, and this is never more welcome than in my experience as an expat. These communication tools mean that anxieties about isolation from family and friends are consigned to the past. We can talk and see in real time: no tiresome agency, no time lapse. So much so we seem to talk, post and share perhaps even more than we would if we were living in the same country.
What a difference there was in the expat or emigrant’s experience before this time: not twenty or thirty years ago, but even just ten years ago.
How quaint it feels, when I picture myself at University in the mid-1990s (hardly ancient history) scavenging in my room for coins to drop into my trouser pocket and walk, jangling, over the road to the public payphone booth, to lean inside it as I periodically slide my hand into my pocket to retrieve another coin to buy an extra minute of assurances to my mother of my mental and physical health. A ten-second line tapped into Whatsapp would do the job nowadays.
At the time of writing, we are on the ninth iteration of the iPhone giving the illusion that these devices have been embedded in our lives for a long time, but smartphones have only been a mainstay for as many years. The development is concertinaed into a far shorter span than we perhaps feel (albeit this forward march of the product line is more to take advantage of the public’s cyclical need to consume rather than step-changes in technology).
When it comes to personal devices and applications, technology rather resembles a plane that’s been taxiing for a very long time to the runway and, only in the last decade, has been given permission to ascend and soar.
What is equally remarkable is how quickly we have got used to it and how quickly we have forgotten the rhythms of our daily lives before this tech arrived.
So I stand there, watching the scene in my living room, on this weekend morning. It’s clear that obtaining our own devices to become voluntarily lost in has been an unprecedented exercise in the de-democratisation of family leisure time. No more arguing over who guards the remote control, which channel to switch to, which programme to watch, no more the majority rules. Now everyone wins.
The complete individualisation of entertainment is an irony of sorts: everyone sits together, but there is not one second of shared experience.
I look on the bright side. There is peace and quiet. The perfect opportunity, I think. I sit down with them, open up my laptop and write this blog.