'Conversation might soon become a lost art if tech keeps taking over our lives'

20 January 2024 , 18:48

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'This isn’t a world I want to live in, isolated behind goggles'

I risk sounding like a total nana here but I’ve come to the sad conclusion that tech is taking over our lives.

I went to my brother Liam’s house for a lovely family meal to celebrate what would have been our mum Cath’s 70th birthday. It was a gorgeous day – until Liam brought up his excitement about the upcoming launch of a new pair of mixed reality goggles, the Apple Vision Pro. “You can take a picture by blinking your eyes!” he exclaimed, like a kid getting excited for Christmas.

Well, I exploded. Why would I want to take a picture by blinking my eyes? That isn’t a world I want to live in, where we’re isolated behind goggles.

It’s all gone too far. You go out for dinner and families are sat at tables staring at their phones instead of talking to each other. Before that, they’ve probably had to scan a QR code or download an app to look at the menu and order their meal. Bring back the paper menu and the young waiter doing a Saturday job, please.

Lisa Riley (Sunday Mirror)

On the Uber app, you can request a silent drive so the driver doesn’t talk to you on the journey. Why? It’s ridiculous. When I go to buy a jumper in M&S, I want to chat about the weather or what’s on telly with Janice on the till, not scan it at a soulless self-checkout.

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My dad Terry’s a very clever man but when he gets the train to London he wants a physical ticket that’s checked by a conductor, not an e-ticket on an app that he has to faff about ­scanning at a gate. For many people who live alone, particularly older people, the highlight of their week is their weekly big shop, a chance to get out of the house and have some social interaction.

A bit of chit-chat with the person on the till might be the only conversation they have that day. Yet the big corporations are taking that vital human interaction away by replacing checkout staff with self-service terminals.

At Emmerdale, we can use iPads to learn our scripts but I’m old-school and still do it the old-fashioned way I was taught at drama school, using a pen and paper to make notes on my script. Don’t get me wrong, advances in technology have undoubtedly transformed our lives and made them easier in ways. But it is isolating us and silencing us in damaging ways, too.

We’re losing the art of ­conversation, human interaction and with it, I fear, some of the qualities that make us human.

Lisa Riley