Last night, my husband and I were watching one of my favorite TV shows, “The Big Bang Theory”. The show began with a scene in which Sheldon, Raj, Howard, Leonard and Amy were eating dinner in the living room in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment. Everyone was staring at their cell phone, except Amy, who had the same disgusted look on her face I sometimes get when I’m out to dinner with my husband and he’s paying more attention to his phone than he is to me. After a deep sigh, Amy said something like, “Couldn’t we have a nice dinner conversation face to face?”, and Sheldon replied, “We could, but thanks to Steve Jobs, we don’t have to.”

This scene stuck in my head, because I don’t know about you, but even though I have a smart phone, I wonder how smart we really are if we are paying so much attention to an electronic device that we are missing out on connecting directly with other human beings.

Let’s see a show of hands: How many of you immediately pull out your smart phone when you are in a public place alone, instead of people-watching or interacting with strangers? Some of my best memories are from conversations I started with strangers before cell phones came along. I used to strike up conversations with strangers to pass the time, and often learned things about both them and myself in the process. Sometimes it started with a casual compliment on something they were wearing, or their haircut. Sometimes it was to ask directions when I was visting somewhere I’d never been before, or didn’t know well. Sometimes we just talked about the weather. But occasionally we made a deeper connection that led to a discussion of commonalities and a feeling of connectivity that I personally don’t get when I’m reading or sending a text.

Today at the college where I work, we held an orientation for sixty new international students, who will be studying at CCSF starting next week. These students recently flew to San Francisco from all over the world, and many didn’t know a soul in the room. At noon we gave them a lunch break, and I left the room briefly to consult with a colleague down the hall. When I came back, I found a room full of students eating with one hand and staring at the phones they were holding in their other hand. No one was talking to the person sitting next to them to ask their name and where they were from. No one was discussing the classes they planned to take, their concerns about studying in a new country in a foreign language, the jet lag they were suffering, or how much they missed their families already. What ever happened to that longing for a human connection, that chance to meet someone new who could at the very least make that moment in time a bit more interesting, and at best become a new friend, or boyfriend or girlfriend?

How are we going to connect with other people in real life if we only know how to talk to them through a machine? Your phone may be smart, but if you miss out on the wonderful, wacky world out there because you are too busy to look up and connect with those around you, you are, at least in my book, a bit dumb.

Thanks for nothing, Steve Jobs.