A guy called Iain Macaulay did tremendous work in the arts and cultural department with the old Fermanagh District Council.

Sadly no longer with us, he was a genuinely good lad, bright and articulate and imaginative in his work on a range of projects.

Iain joined us at Enniskillen Rangers Football Club, and I recall one night at training when he and Roy Cathcart were running behind me around the pitch in what is now known as the “warm-up”.

I was more interested in their conversation about Samuel Beckett than the training run.

Iain had an idea about promoting a festival about the playwright and was asking Roy if he taught any Beckett at the Collegiate.

Roy explained that his students found his life view rather bleak.

“Crikey,” I thought (out loud). “That’s a first – two Enniskillen Rangers players discussing Beckett!”

I was never an enthusiastic trainer, so the discussion was a welcome distraction.

Fast forward a good few years, and there was another distraction at Enniskillen Rangers on Saturday as I sat in the stand (the Roy Cathcart Stand, as it goes) watching the team play Enniskillen Town.

Behind me, Sean Paul Curry informed us that Manchester United were 1-0 down at home; then his phone bleeped again.

2-0 down, he announced. We all chortled, except for Brian Keenan who was sitting next to me.

“Robbo” would have the last laugh when his team came back to win 3-2, but for a while our concentration was attracted away to Manchester and other English grounds.

Aside from the differing topics of Beckett plays and Man United’s misfortunes, distraction of attention to other things was the order of the day.

The means of communication in transporting our minds elsewhere were worlds apart though.

The immediacy of smartphones is a modern phenomenon which Iain and Roy could never have contemplated years ago. Progress?

I imagined the two characters in Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” in today’s world of communication.

“Was lying in a ditch last night and got an awful beating,” tweets Estragon.

Vladimir hits “like”.

A likely scenario now, even if the two of them were in the same physical space, and suddenly everyone knows what’s happening to them.

If we thought the two tramps’ conversation was aimless and without significance, what do you make of today’s inane ramblings on social media?

I’m not sure why the world needs to know what you had for dinner. Or why you need to publicly wish your “babe” happy birthday.

Or why, as one Sunday newspaper columnist points out, the latest TikTok craze is a video of someone cracking an egg on a toddler’s head and placing it in the frying pan.

The egg, not the toddler, he helpfully points out.

Before this all turns into a rant by a miserable old sod about the rise in our use of smartphone etc., let me say that, firstly, I use mine all the time, and also that it is a tremendous advance in communication in so many ways.

It comes with a warning, though.

According to that Sunday newspaper article: “The amount of time we spend on our phones increases month by month.

“In 2020, it was 3.7 hours a day. Last year the figure was 4 hours and 14 minutes. Including laptops, tablets and stuff, that time goes up to about six hours and 20 minutes a day spent on the internet.

“Vodaphone has just reported that we spend 30 hours each month just texting or ringing people.”

The smartphone has taken over our lives and has replaced many objects we used to rely on.

We don’t bother with a landline anymore, so it’s a phone (obvs). Among other things, it’s a watch and alarm clock, a camera, a diary and calendar.

We don’t need paper tickets for events any more; I’ve used it to get into the theatre, football matches in England, on buses and so on.

It’s a television; when others in the house are watching something else, I can watch a live match on my phone, though goodness knows what it’s doing to my eyes.

It’s a personal banking system where we can pay bills, donate to charity and transfer money quickly to the kids.

Or a shop where we can buy things from home, book holidays or hotels.

The downside is that things are so automated now that it’s frustratingly difficult to get a human being on the end of the line if there’s an issue.

It’s a computer, where we can receive and send emails and use the full range of social media where we can read links to newspaper articles, find inspirational quotations or verses and keep in touch with friends through WhatsApp groups.

With a good smartphone, the world’s your oyster; or as Arthur Daley would say, the world’s your lobster, my son. (You can even watch old Minder clips!)

What’s not to like?

Well, perhaps like most things, the danger is in the way people take something very beneficial and use it unwisely or, worse, maliciously.

Is the smartphone a tremendous boon to society by connecting people as never before?

Or has it become a danger to that society?

Both, I suspect.

It’s certainly reduced our concentration span, not least because of the limitations of word counts and the availability of short articles means there are many longer pieces deemed ‘TLDR’ (too long didn’t read).

It has affected our social skills; regularly you’ll see people in restaurants or other places continually on their phones rather than engaging each other in conversations; the way, indeed, Iain and Roy did! Social media is also particularly intrusive, and yet we continue to give it a lot of personal information about ourselves.

Worse, perhaps, is the contradiction that at a time when information from across the world and across a range of topics has never been more plentifully available, we choose only the stuff that fits our world view.

You’ll quickly find an unchecked, cleverly written article to back up any crackpot idea.

Watch the interviews with people in the United States who think that Joe Biden is dead, and his part is being played by a hologram, and you’ll see what I mean.

And, of course, we have the keyboard warriors who hide behind anonymity to abuse people with whom they disagree.

Troll is the parlance; more accurately, they’re vicious little so-and-sos really whose personal abuse of people is disturbing and even dangerous.

Social media companies should be held accountable much more.

A politician once advised his colleagues that “complaining about the press is a bit like the captain of a ship complaining about the weather”. Perhaps that can be applied to modern communications.

Smartphones and the rest are here to stay. They can be a tremendous asset to us if we use them responsibly.