A couple of years ago, in a very klutzy moment, I was running in the house on my way out the door to work and (whoops!) tripped. Upward, upward I sailed in an arc and landed with a great deal of momentum on a wood-backed chair. Turns out the chair acted a bit like a baseball bat, breaking my humerus (the arm bone between the shoulder and elbow) into two separate and distinct pieces, while the force of the floor smashed my other arm at the shoulder.
In another time and place, I’d have lain there, largely immobile until ... well, who knows? Fortunately, we live in a time of mobile phones and even though my broken arms lacked the capacity to dial for help, a combination of knee and nose somehow made the call.
Long story short, during the next six months I bonded very intensely with my phone; with my arms taped to my body I could still hold it between my hands — think T.Rex style — and interact with the world.
New ownership: Cape Cod Irish Village will move to Resort and Conference Center in Hyannis
However, between gratitude for its saving signal and the life raft it offered in the subsequent months, I may have bonded a little too closely.
And then came Sori
I’m not alone. Although I reached the merge point in a unique way, lots of us arrived at the same place. Collectively, our phones act like extensions of our bodies. We rarely separate from them. Message posting, photo checking, game playing, investment monitoring, doomscrolling, texting, and yes, maybe even talking — we live as one with our device. Like most of us, I had stopped noticing its ubiquity.
And then came Sori. No, Sori is not a new app, a new device, or some clever artificial intelligence (AI). She is instead that most old-fashioned of human companions: a dog. A Jindo-Korean Village Dog mix, if you want the visuals. Twenty-five pounds of cream-hued doubled coated fur, curly tail, triangular ears, a twitching liver nose and eyes that speak very clearly. She arrived fully house trained and media literate.
This is a 21st-century pup. She watches TV actively — eye motion tracking, ears listening and even a little head bob. But her media awareness goes to a whole new level when it comes to smartphones. She understands video on the small screen, too. I can pull up, well, really anything with a dog in it and she watches along with me. She participates in Facetime calls with people she knows. She recognizes the hums, buzzes, and alert beeps emanating from our various devices.
But — unlike us humankind — she knows how to manage her media. She has decided I need to do a much better job at this task, and training me has become her project.