Phones are changing lives, one dumb text at a time

If I’m honest, we’re still doing that, just from a different venue.

One insight I can share about bands in the contemporary milieu is that they can be little more than glorified WhatsApp groups. This is awesome, because hirsute, jaunty young rakes are at their best when sharing tongue-in-cheek banter.

Our band was a group of five in the traditional rock format and we would filter into the dealership in dribs and drabs every Friday evening to run through a selection of rough-and-ready originals. Picking our way past rows of Big Boy scooters, pit bikes and some masculine superbikes, we felt ourselves gradually gradually, incrementally masculated as we entered our jam room.

By the time we reached the little rehearsal space at the back, we had touched so many motorcycles, we were sweating pure testosterone. The perfect state in which to start singing about women and drinking.

One particular Friday, the first four of us had dribbed and drabbed inside, then began shooting the breeze while awaiting the arrival of our manly guitarist, Mark. We talked him home on WhatsApp, sharing general bits of insight and the usual insinuations that he does not adequately express his gay side. As if any of us do.

Then WhatsApp went quiet, and we knew that Mark was on his way up the stairs, so practice could start.

When Mark arrived, though, he looked like a pig who’d been through a bush backwards. His macho Steve Newman-esque hairstyle was all awry, the buttons of his shirt were torn, and his eyes were bloodshot. He was ashen!

“I’ve just been in a car crash,” he confirmed, because that was exactly what it looked like.

It turned out that Mark had been hit by a vehicle in the road right outside the jam spot just as we had been analysing his sexuality on WhatsApp.

He was so shaken that a rehearsal was quite out of the question. He took out his phone, and in attempting to phone the AA, he called his Auntie Dawn, then became trapped in a conversation with her about how he’d just had an accident and, yes, he was okay and, no, he didn’t think he needed to go to the hospital, and the car was not driveable, but might not be a write-off.

We immediately cancelled practice. We went outside to the crash scene, where we set about retrieving Mark’s important stuff out of his car and organising him a lift to the police station to report the incident. The other driver, fortune be praised, was not harmed.

As we did so, we were sheepishly aware that we – us, the other four – were responsible for Mark’s car crash. We had distracted him with japery and camp banter, which may have led to that lady T-boning him on Fourth Avenue.

It was telecommunications that enabled it, but we were to blame. We had made Mark crash his car as sure as if we’d thrown a bucket full of soapy water across his windscreen, or if we’d scattered a handful of nails in front of his car.

We had made Mark crash by remote control. Cyber-banter made him do it.

As it turned out, the car was indeed a write-off. But now Mark drives a Subaru BRZ, a highly impressive two-seater sports car. As fortune would have it, he is also far more in touch with his gay side, which is for the best.

Mark never really broached the matter of our responsibility in so many words. But you could sense that something in our relationships changed that night.

For the other four of us in the band, The Guilty Four, we no longer text each other if we know we are driving. That close scrape, that moment of madness in Linden, it changed things – Mark’s life, our relationships, the trajectory of our band, perhaps … and it was because of our own silliness, and the irresponsible use of our technology.

That night, we were but scratching the surface of the true, life-altering power of the devices we hold in our hands. But that night taught us respect.

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