Technology can leave us all in world of our own

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

You know the world of technology has gone completely mad when the manager of an English Premiership side holds weekly communication sessions for his players – because they’ve forgotten how to talk to each other.

This isn’t to do with the variety of languages in the dressing room or an inability to understand what anyone else is saying – it’s because they spent their day plugged into smartphones and headphones and live in a world of their own.

Southampton manager Ronald Koeman comes from a time when the banter on the bus was one of the reasons that teams bonded so well together – although he was also part of a Dutch side where the team was split down the middle over colour, so it wasn’t necessarily the best of times then either.

In this case the solution is not as simple as forcing them to sit down and have a chat – but it’s a variation on that designed to make it seem more complex.

Koeman holds a weekly “life kinetics” session, at which players typically carry out two tasks simultaneously, such as passing a football and catching a tennis ball, while communicating with a team-mate.

Or what we used to call shooting the breeze.

It’s easy poke fun at footballers – hugely overpaid and over-egoed, living in some sort of billionaire’s bubble where setting off fireworks in your bathroom (a la Mario Balotelli) doesn’t seem a ridiculous thing to do – but you don’t have to leave your own home to experience this phenomenon.

You can pull your hair out at the bizarre scenario where your kids are on their separate tablets or games console, playing FIFA or Minecraft or whatever the game du jour for their age group happens to be.

They might even be playing against each other, sitting on the same couch – but they are entirely engrossed in the little blue screen that lights up their faces, not uttering as much as a syllable to each other throughout the entire process.

Luxury cars come with video screens as standard in the back seat – lesser mortals can purchase these devices and hook them onto the headrest with Velcro straps – so that children don’t have to look out the window on long journeys.

Instead they can watch videos and listen on their headphones, so that they get to the other end of the journey without feeling bored, or asking every three minutes: “Are we there yet?”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune