By Two & Out

Why were we all so intrigued by the emergency alert test?

May 11, 2018 | 1:39 PM

YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT it was the apocalypse.

CFJC’s staff was sitting in a meeting on Wednesday when the much talked about emergency alert test took place.

Simultaneously, about 30 phones started chirping and buzzing and otherwise making a ruckus.

While not everyone received the alert, those who did were well alerted.

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And then came the social media aftershocks.

People couldn’t help but share their encounters with the unprecedented mass alert test.

They got it, they didn’t get it, they heard it on the radio, they saw it on TV.

One person said it surprised him so much, he nearly drove off the road.

On CFJC’s Facebook page, a simple post asking whether people received the alert generated nearly 900 comments in 24 hours.

Why were people so eager to talk about a simple buzz on their phones?

Perhaps because, as a society, we don’t experience anything all together anymore.

Besides sporting events, there is no such thing as appointment viewing.

Smartphone and PVR users catch up with their news on their own time, at their own leisure, and that can deepen a sense of isolation for all us.

Save for an eclipse or an earthquake, there isn’t anything we all see and hear and feel at the same time.

So it was a major novelty for a notification to hit almost all of us at the same time.

It’s a stark illustration of something we all intuitively know already, if we’re honest with ourselves: that it would literally take an act of God to get us out of our screen-focused lives.

And even then, we’ll still be looking at our phones