I read the article you linked about the cognitive effects of a smartphone on your brain a few years back, and it's really stuck with me. I consider the effect of the phone on my brain to be an addictive one. But I also don't get withdrawal symptoms from it if it's truly, genuinely inaccessible. If I leave the office for a walk on lunch break and leave the phone behind, I don't find myself reaching for it. If I spend a week in the mountains and have no service, I'm not furiously trying to find it. But the instant it's in the room with me again, the pull at my mind is obvious and irresistible. If I have to bring it on my lunch break, I'll read my texts and check my email and my substack notifications. "I don't want to look at it, so I won't, even though it's here" is not a choice that I presently have the willpower to make.
(The only exception: It's easy, now, to put it away if I'm with people. I think this was a Covid change - a year without them starved me so badly for company that a phone will never again feel like the preferable target for my attention when a human being is in the room with me.)
Anyway-- great post, and I agree! Unsurprisingly! I would like to have the choice to leave it behind and feel that tug on my brain relax. I hate that I can't.
But I'll end on a gripe: I'm not allowed to have separate phones for work and not-work. My employer won't subsidize a work phone for me even though a ridiculous amount of my work takes places on a phone because of lobbying and all the away-from-the-office work that entails. I'm expected to use my own data on work and also have my email and legislative contacts sharing the same device as my personal email and friends and family. I can't just have the phone away from me during certain hours because this would be something like an abdication of duty. The assumption that I would be fine with this is, to me, a telling symptom of what phones have become to us, and how illogical it seems to people these days that someone might want to get to decide whether they're on or off.
I'm old enough to remember the "two phones" days and those were immensely better. Then I remember when employers switched to "we'll subsidize your phone" in what was dubbed the Bring Your Own Device era. Then by the time I got into the workforce it was "well, that's on you, of course you have a smartphone."
I find this a highly (hate this word) toxic version of modern work culture.
This is one of the many reasons why Android phones are awesome: firewalled profiles. At my previous company, for instance, I brought my own Pixel to work and activated a ‘work profile’. My company literally could not snoop on my personal profile data even if they had wanted to. And, better yet, with one tap I was able to instantly and fully disable all work notifications (and work app access!) on weekends / holidays / etc.
You have perfectly captured the allure and practicality of smart phones, as well as the poignant way they have already changed us. Your story about waiting to hear who Obama would choose for a running mate takes me back to an even more consequential moment in history--the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On November 9, 1989, I was sitting in Jimmy’s, my favorite dive bar, with a group of friends, when another friend burst into the bar and yelled, “The Berlin Wall came down! Turn on the TV!” She had seen the news on her dorm TV and knew that we all would be at Jimmy’s, so she ran over to tell us. We all raised a glass to the brave folks in Berlin, and to the soldiers who laid down their guns rather than shoot any more of their fellow citizens. It was an amazing and powerful moment of celebrating together. In the age of smart phones it would just have been everyone getting an alert on our phones. Smart phones have transformed the world, mostly for good, but there are losses too.
OMG, I get that this is kitchsy, but I am sincerely moved by it. I have friends who lived under Communism (in Prague, not East Berlin, but still), and on their behalf I say Hooray for tributes to freedom, electric jackets and all!
Good point, I had one draft of this with a lot of examples and two factor authentication was one of them. I have a lot of problems with two factor authentication, namely, if you have your phone stolen (or lost) it becomes impossible to log in to accounts to lock them down.
I try (and often fail, but so it goes) to keep my phone away from my work desk for certain periods of the day. Nothing more annoying than putting my phone in another room, turning on the do not disturb mode, settling in at my desk to put in some concentrated effort, and learning that Teams, Sharepoint, and Outlook have all done an automatic reset and need a 6-digit code to let me back in to my work station, in my physical office. If my phone ever runs out of battery and I need to work remotely from my laptop (which I do all the time in the legislature) I just won’t work, I guess!
At my last job I needed two two factor authenticate almost every sign in. Which typically meant "Well, I have my phone out, may as well go and see if there's anything interesting in Freddie's comments."
Unpopular opinion: Instant access to 24/7 news is largely a bug, not a feature. I keep meaning to write a full post on this someday, but in the meantime I’ll just share a few more thoughts here.
With (very) few exceptions...
- Instant news generally makes us unhappy and stressed.
- It doesn’t help us make better decisions for ourselves or society
- And we can get the info we need to be informed citizens with less stress by reading a well-written weekly news magazine
And -- while I haven’t had the discipline myself to do this yet -- my sense is that we’d all probably be happier just checking / replying to non-urgent messages once a day, spending the rest of the day focused on, well, being focused on work, family, friends, hobbies, etc.
Just want to echo the weekly newsmagazine comment! For the most part, we don’t need to know the minute-by-minute happenings of the world. And so often, stories change from the initial report to the investigation, but many readers don’t read the follow ups because they already feel informed about whatever the story is. I grew up reading Newsweek every weekend, and I felt much more informed overall as a kid than I do as an adult scrolling through my Apple News feed.
I wrote a book 21 years ago about the fact that the tech industry is not reflective of the tech we build (I've been in industry 30 years). We don't think about the ethical, social and political implications of our tech. One area of focus was wearable computers. A lot of tech starts in the defense and military industry, then is introduced in prisons, then to pets and children, then to the general population. My anxiety then was with chips embedded in humans. Well, the ubiquity of the mobile phone, as you point out, is one degree away from embedded tech. I'm still concerned about this area....
I have been resisting the smart phone for years. We have flip phones through a good service. We use iPads for email so we can carry them around the house although it is hard to type on them. I am 76 and have used the internet before it became open to everyone. That was an easier time.
I am thinking about getting a smart phone for some of the requirements that are emerging, but there will be one for the household, not a lot of data usage - it is expensive- and we will read our email on computers or tablets. It is lack of WiFi access that pushes the smartphone need. My sister leaves in the country and cannot get decent WiFi ther even trying various expensive services. She uses a smartphone out of necessity but keeps her data use as low as possible because it is expensive. Email is also slow and difficult. We hope this will improve but are not confident about it. Most of the new effort seems to be going to cheap service for low income people in cities.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts! I think about this all the time. I consciously navigate myself between the “ natural “ world and the technology world, taking the best from both. For “seniors” this is almost mandatory, but when we are all gone this ability will change I am afraid. I gave my daughter a beautiful fountain pen and some really fine stationery for her birthday, recently. We will see?!
In college I remember thinking, “why would you need a camera on your phone?” That’s the kind of visionary I was.
If you and Ed start a company I promise I'll invest.
Why would I want my iPod to make phone calls?
Me, 2009
I read the article you linked about the cognitive effects of a smartphone on your brain a few years back, and it's really stuck with me. I consider the effect of the phone on my brain to be an addictive one. But I also don't get withdrawal symptoms from it if it's truly, genuinely inaccessible. If I leave the office for a walk on lunch break and leave the phone behind, I don't find myself reaching for it. If I spend a week in the mountains and have no service, I'm not furiously trying to find it. But the instant it's in the room with me again, the pull at my mind is obvious and irresistible. If I have to bring it on my lunch break, I'll read my texts and check my email and my substack notifications. "I don't want to look at it, so I won't, even though it's here" is not a choice that I presently have the willpower to make.
(The only exception: It's easy, now, to put it away if I'm with people. I think this was a Covid change - a year without them starved me so badly for company that a phone will never again feel like the preferable target for my attention when a human being is in the room with me.)
Anyway-- great post, and I agree! Unsurprisingly! I would like to have the choice to leave it behind and feel that tug on my brain relax. I hate that I can't.
But I'll end on a gripe: I'm not allowed to have separate phones for work and not-work. My employer won't subsidize a work phone for me even though a ridiculous amount of my work takes places on a phone because of lobbying and all the away-from-the-office work that entails. I'm expected to use my own data on work and also have my email and legislative contacts sharing the same device as my personal email and friends and family. I can't just have the phone away from me during certain hours because this would be something like an abdication of duty. The assumption that I would be fine with this is, to me, a telling symptom of what phones have become to us, and how illogical it seems to people these days that someone might want to get to decide whether they're on or off.
I'm old enough to remember the "two phones" days and those were immensely better. Then I remember when employers switched to "we'll subsidize your phone" in what was dubbed the Bring Your Own Device era. Then by the time I got into the workforce it was "well, that's on you, of course you have a smartphone."
I find this a highly (hate this word) toxic version of modern work culture.
This is one of the many reasons why Android phones are awesome: firewalled profiles. At my previous company, for instance, I brought my own Pixel to work and activated a ‘work profile’. My company literally could not snoop on my personal profile data even if they had wanted to. And, better yet, with one tap I was able to instantly and fully disable all work notifications (and work app access!) on weekends / holidays / etc.
I am noting this for my next phone upgrade
You have perfectly captured the allure and practicality of smart phones, as well as the poignant way they have already changed us. Your story about waiting to hear who Obama would choose for a running mate takes me back to an even more consequential moment in history--the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On November 9, 1989, I was sitting in Jimmy’s, my favorite dive bar, with a group of friends, when another friend burst into the bar and yelled, “The Berlin Wall came down! Turn on the TV!” She had seen the news on her dorm TV and knew that we all would be at Jimmy’s, so she ran over to tell us. We all raised a glass to the brave folks in Berlin, and to the soldiers who laid down their guns rather than shoot any more of their fellow citizens. It was an amazing and powerful moment of celebrating together. In the age of smart phones it would just have been everyone getting an alert on our phones. Smart phones have transformed the world, mostly for good, but there are losses too.
I was sitting in the back of my parents car driving somewhere when we heard the news on the radio. My first memory of world news!
I thought David Hasselhoff helped.
Whoa. Fake news in the 80s.
Maybe so! That would help to explain why he is still so beloved in Germany.
How Mr. Hasselhoff Tore Down This Wall.
The video of the electric jacket!
https://www.npr.org/2014/11/09/362595983/how-mr-hasselhoff-tore-down-this-wall
OMG, I get that this is kitchsy, but I am sincerely moved by it. I have friends who lived under Communism (in Prague, not East Berlin, but still), and on their behalf I say Hooray for tributes to freedom, electric jackets and all!
Authentication for so many platforms requires a cell phone so even beyond all the other points you make there has been forced usage.
Good point, I had one draft of this with a lot of examples and two factor authentication was one of them. I have a lot of problems with two factor authentication, namely, if you have your phone stolen (or lost) it becomes impossible to log in to accounts to lock them down.
I try (and often fail, but so it goes) to keep my phone away from my work desk for certain periods of the day. Nothing more annoying than putting my phone in another room, turning on the do not disturb mode, settling in at my desk to put in some concentrated effort, and learning that Teams, Sharepoint, and Outlook have all done an automatic reset and need a 6-digit code to let me back in to my work station, in my physical office. If my phone ever runs out of battery and I need to work remotely from my laptop (which I do all the time in the legislature) I just won’t work, I guess!
At my last job I needed two two factor authenticate almost every sign in. Which typically meant "Well, I have my phone out, may as well go and see if there's anything interesting in Freddie's comments."
Unpopular opinion: Instant access to 24/7 news is largely a bug, not a feature. I keep meaning to write a full post on this someday, but in the meantime I’ll just share a few more thoughts here.
With (very) few exceptions...
- Instant news generally makes us unhappy and stressed.
- It doesn’t help us make better decisions for ourselves or society
- And we can get the info we need to be informed citizens with less stress by reading a well-written weekly news magazine
And -- while I haven’t had the discipline myself to do this yet -- my sense is that we’d all probably be happier just checking / replying to non-urgent messages once a day, spending the rest of the day focused on, well, being focused on work, family, friends, hobbies, etc.
Am I taking crazy pills here or...? :D
Just want to echo the weekly newsmagazine comment! For the most part, we don’t need to know the minute-by-minute happenings of the world. And so often, stories change from the initial report to the investigation, but many readers don’t read the follow ups because they already feel informed about whatever the story is. I grew up reading Newsweek every weekend, and I felt much more informed overall as a kid than I do as an adult scrolling through my Apple News feed.
I wrote a book 21 years ago about the fact that the tech industry is not reflective of the tech we build (I've been in industry 30 years). We don't think about the ethical, social and political implications of our tech. One area of focus was wearable computers. A lot of tech starts in the defense and military industry, then is introduced in prisons, then to pets and children, then to the general population. My anxiety then was with chips embedded in humans. Well, the ubiquity of the mobile phone, as you point out, is one degree away from embedded tech. I'm still concerned about this area....
Thank you for the comment. Your book sounds fascinating. What was it called?
Techno-Human Mesh: The Growing Power of Information Technologies https://a.co/d/0yEzjX5
It’s on Amazon -
Buy a used copy it’s cheaper.
Keep in mind it’s 20 years old so tech is old but ideas are same.
I have been resisting the smart phone for years. We have flip phones through a good service. We use iPads for email so we can carry them around the house although it is hard to type on them. I am 76 and have used the internet before it became open to everyone. That was an easier time.
I am thinking about getting a smart phone for some of the requirements that are emerging, but there will be one for the household, not a lot of data usage - it is expensive- and we will read our email on computers or tablets. It is lack of WiFi access that pushes the smartphone need. My sister leaves in the country and cannot get decent WiFi ther even trying various expensive services. She uses a smartphone out of necessity but keeps her data use as low as possible because it is expensive. Email is also slow and difficult. We hope this will improve but are not confident about it. Most of the new effort seems to be going to cheap service for low income people in cities.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts! I think about this all the time. I consciously navigate myself between the “ natural “ world and the technology world, taking the best from both. For “seniors” this is almost mandatory, but when we are all gone this ability will change I am afraid. I gave my daughter a beautiful fountain pen and some really fine stationery for her birthday, recently. We will see?!