We love our phones, our tablets, and our televisions. Don't you dare get between us, because without them, we might as well struggle as though we somehow lost a limb.
Working in newspapers, my industry has had to adapt its market to accommodate those people who spend all their free time staring at electronic devices. It’s a vastly different message and business model than simply leaving a newspaper on your doorstep every morning. Screeners want news instantly. You can measure their hunger in tweets.
I understand and acknowledge that technology is dictating this next phase in our evolution, the one where news is something altogether different than what the Cronkites, the Murrows, the Woodwards thought it should be.
I sit back and revel at George Orwell's genius. Having recently re-read "1984" (so that I can effectively teach its lessons to budding journalism students), I am duly impressed. While Orwell did not envision screens, he envisioned what was behind the screens - which actually brings me to Backgammon — and a few lines of poetry.
I try to write a haiku each day. I boil down some idea into 17 syllables, post it on social media, and hope that someone on a screen somewhere likes what I happened to be thinking at a random moment. Mostly, it gives my teenage daughters a chance to mock me publicly and question my sanity. But I recently posted a haiku that made mention of board games, and I got a ton of responses and likes.
I wrote it because five feet from my laptop screen is a stack of board games that I've played over the course of a lifetime. There's chess, Sorry, Risk, Life, Monopoly, Othello and more modern games like Scattergories and even the infamous Cards Against Humanity. It's a decent collection in all, and I don’t look upon them as future yard sale selections. They represent moments together, family time, and singular moments — in victory or defeat — of sharing, laughter and camaradarie.
I’m not proud of the number of times my son has cleaned my clock in chess, or how much a newspaper editor might stink at Scrabble. These are the precious moments we lose in the din of technology, the moments away from the dining room table.
There's probably a haiku to be written about game night. But I guarantee you, the joy of being together, screenless and without that cold e-pretentiousness, makes us all winners. Double or nothing.
And there ought to be some poetry in that.