Over the past two weeks, a new app called Pokemon Go has taken the Western world by storm, engaging millions of users in the new app. While it has provoked the introverted zombie cell phone users to go outside and become Steve Irwin in terms of animated cartoon hunting, the issue of "zombie youth" still presides.
Yes, a new app that engages people of all ages is a wonderful escape from the growing horrors of this world. But it is just another app that engulfs us entirely and makes us just one more step away from our humanity. You may be thinking to yourself "Are you crazy? The app has made lazy kids become active and make new friends!" Now I ask: what app HASN'T done that already? Snapchat encourages folks to go outside to "catch" the cool geotags that appear on the bottom of each picture. We already make platonic friendships with strangers on Twitter because of our related interests. Pokemon Go has only combined those two elements and made it more explicit.
Go outside for a little bit and walk into any Starbucks or mainstream food place. You will see people on their phones and laptops, feeding into these pieces of metal and falling out of reality. Seems like long ago, where we go out and actually make memories during dates and other social gatherings. Now it's just short passes of "Get in my Snapchat" and "Pic for the 'Gram," where we make our memories via collecting photos and videos on our camera roll to collect dust. These aren't making memories: these are catching moments in our little baskets we like to call iCloud storage.
All along, we have already been playing Pokemon Go with our zombie lives of social media addiction. We have the urge to "catch moments" because of our fear of missing out or meeting the social standards we live by. Our "Pikachus" and "Charizards" are the urges to attend certain social events because "we need them for our collection." As mentioned previously, the game itself draws parallels to the lives we already live. Snapchatting an entire concert is like catching a Pokemon. We go out of our ways to go to a concert, just to view it through the lens of our phones and not our own lens of our eyes. Why do we do this? Simple: it's just how the applications have taken over our lives. By that same comparison, Pokemon Go works in that way. Explicitly, we go out our ways to go find these digital animals and have them become part of our phone's empire of data. Sure, the app makes us get back on our feet but really, we are just mimicking the actions we have been doing all along: "catching" memories to our phones and not our own brain.
