Hello again, take a seat. How have you been? Oh really? I’ve been doing quite well myself. Just moved into my accommodation, and things are going swimmingly. I think me and my roommate are going to have to rearrange the furniture again though – his piano arrived and its dimensions were somewhat underappreciated.
I’ve been thinking about technology lately. Truth be told I think about it a lot, and not just because of what I study. The stuff’s just everywhere now, and I’ve found becoming an adult (only technically of course, everyone knows a student is just a large child with sleep deprivation) only increases the scenarios where you need your phone or your laptop to do things. Or at least, think you do.
Until upper-sixth, I didn’t have a smartphone. At first this was a pretty typical parental mandate – they just didn’t think kids should have them. And in primary school I didn’t care either way, in fact I had my first cellphone more or less thrust upon me so I could bike to school without Mom worrying.
(Brief side-note: That first phone was a Nokia 100 and it’s the best I’ve ever had. As-small-as-can-be without reaching the point of being hard to use, light, had extra features like reminders and a radio better than most you get in cars, SNAKE which I became god-like at playing, and a battery that could go (I kid you not) two weeks without a charge. Just perfection.)
By secondary school it became clear everyone else had a smartphone, but I didn’t mind until people noticed me clicking and clacking away, pointed at the boy with the strange relic you couldn’t even browse the web on. Then, when I was about 14, my parents asked me how I felt about not having a modern phone. I said I probably would like one if I had the chance. They handed me a dozen articles exploring the consequences of owning one. I was amazed. Study after study showing negative effects on attention, focus and recall just by having one in the room with you, not to mention endless storied of the alienation and social vacuums created by social media. And that was that, I was convinced, told them I didn’t want one.
And of course it wasn’t just that, I also came to love the contrariness of it. My peers didn’t think I was some kind of freak, they were just amazed these things still got made any more. You’d be surprised just how many people asked if they could have a go on snake.
But I was still convinced it was the better choice. And you know what? I still am. It took a summer crush who lived in another town, and the repetitive strain this gave my thumbs, for me to finally switch over. And it hasn’t made my life better. Sure, I can do things I couldn’t before: Look stuff up away from my computer, type above half a word per second, take pictures and videos, use maps.
But I’m distracted more often. If you get a text, you know it passes at least some low bar of importance – a specific person has sent something specifically to you. Notifications can be about literally anything, some random meme in some random, forgotten groupchat, or an app gasping for you to look at it.
In a related sense, I’m bored less. My childhood was defined by the zany things I got up to when I was bored, writing weird pretend history books or enacting one-man improv plays in my bedroom. Now, I reach for the glittering slab that lives full time in my pocket, open it to see if the ever-shifting, every-changing world of cyberspace has shifted or changed since I last looked at it. My, what a shock and surprise. It has.
And while this might seem a fickle reason, I care about it more. I could throw that first Nokia brick against a wall, in fact I did many times, for demonstration purposes. The wall came away worse. Now my mood can get ruined because the screen got cracked.
Is all this me about to announce that I’m ditching my smart-phone forever? I don’t think so. There are still scenarios where it just helps a lot. But I want to limit this things influence in my life, because it was designed with the express purpose of taking as much of it up as possible. And I think it’s always good when something like this comes around, becomes ubiquitous and accepted, to ask: What does this give us? And what does it take away?
Further reading: Why I Am Not Going To Buy A Computer by Wendell Berry