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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Authentication for so many platforms requires a cell phone so even beyond all the other points you make there has been forced usage.
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
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?!