Writing to Explore #4: Observation

When I went back to my hometown a few weeks ago, I went to Barnes and Noble with

several friends of mine. I’m not sure why, we rarely go there, but that was the choice for the

day, and being a book store it is the ideal situation to use. The Barnes and Noble back home is

an enormous place, full of people on almost any given day. Some days, however, it can be a tad

slow, much like that Saturday. There were handfuls of people in the store scattered to the four

winds, so we had a little bit of somewhat aimless wandering to do.

Obviously, being a bookstore, the most commonplace activity would be to read bits of a

book that one may be interested in. As expected, my friends and I saw a lot of preliminary

reading. There was at least one person per every few aisles, and they were reading anything and

everything from J.K. Rowling to Hunter S. Thompson to National Geographic. In fact, some

people were even finishing books like Anthem. I swear it seems that sometimes people go to the

book store, find the book(s) they want to read, and read them right there without having to pay

for anything. It’s a good deal if one has nothing else to do except read books all day, but seldom

is that the case.

Surprisingly even for a place with free Wi-Fi, there were twice as many people on laptops

at the coffee area rather than in the bookshelves. I noticed this when my friend Elizabeth

decided she wanted some coffee. The rest of us sat down while she bought herself some coffee.

From here, as I allowed my group to continue in their idle conversations, I decided I’d look

around and see what else was going on around me. The activity was much more interesting here,

oddly enough. There were men in business suits sending and receiving possibly important

emails as well as teenage girls eating pastries and idling away on Facebook. Everyone that
wasn’t on a laptop was texting nonstop seemingly until the end of eternity. There were even

some people using the Amazon Kindle (I just thought I’d say that the Kindle is an amazing

gadget that works very well). By this time I began to notice that I was “zoning out”, and

snapped back into the present time when the conversation among my fellows crossed into a

subject that involved me. I joined in, and as I looked up I noticed Elizabeth herself texting like

the other folks sitting at the coffee shop. We finished our conversations as Elizabeth finished her

coffee, and we stood to return home.

As I prepared to leave Barnes and Noble, I thought of how people really seem to be

slowly gravitating towards being completely dependent on technology. Rather than everyone

reading books, roughly half of the readers at the book store read books while the rest read

magazines or Kindles. Everyone was using some sort of electronic device at some point, and I

thought about how much I rely on devices such as my own laptop and cell phone. It makes me

think now that it seems that we are slowly approaching the point where we cannot live without

technology, if we’re not at that point already.