LUNATIC STREET MAGICIAN David Blaine received plenty of attention last year when he imprisoned himself in a Perspex box and hoisted himself up a crane in central London for 44 days. And yet all he was really doing was taking an unfortunate aspect of modern life a little too literally.
Look around Hong Kong for example: people are doing their best to avoid you. On the MTR, on the streets, on the buses, even in restaurants: headphones, ear pieces and ear plugs are the tools with which we create our own little universes of sound, our barriers against each other. There seems to be a generation unable to leave home without plugging something into its ears first.
German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed that technology threatens to become the filter through which we sense the world, and although he died in 1976 - long before the impact of portable devices and gadget-baggage could be realised - the world he predicted is seemingly here today.
When the Walkman was launched in the late 1970s school children everywhere were scolded for their anti-social, headphone-wearing behaviour. Now it seems de rigueur: when we're not listening to music on our iPods, we're on mobile phones. When we're not on the phone, we're listening to music. When we're doing neither, we're probably wearing headphones just so we don't have to talk to that person in the elevator.
The emergence of technology such as the Blackberry - the pocket-sized phone and e-mail keyboard - makes it easier than ever for your office to follow you around. And easier, therefore, for us to not have to acknowledge the world around us, in order to remain further immersed in our own.
Something that brings this nightmarish vision into sharp focus is a series of films unearthed by the Hong Kong Film Archive that offer a glimpse of life here from 100 or so years ago, when we had no such methods of avoiding each other. Pearl River Delta is a series of films to be shown starting this week as part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. A programme devised to celebrate 100 years of cinema in China, it includes pioneering works by the likes of Lai Man-wai, regarded as the father of Hong Kong film.