Author: asym

We’ve become more and more fixated on the aspect of social media we find most personally pernicious: the time-sink, the way an infinite scroll can lead to two hours down the drain with nothing to show for it but that ate-too-much-movie-popcorn feeling.

Simultaneously, Alex has been dealing with some sleep issues over the past month or two (and would guess a lot of people have)! In pursuit of non-pharmacological treatment, Alex has found that creating a little bedtime routine that encompasses small accomplishments has gotten her out of the rut of scrolling through Twitter until it’s an hour past when she meant to fall asleep. Instead, almost every night, she uses Duolingo for about 20 minutes and then spends ___ minutes doing the next day’s New York Times crossword puzzle. The little jingle it plays when the puzzle is completed has started to have a Pavlovian effect, making her feel like it’s time for sleep.

Although it’s nice to see a puzzle archive, and the Duolingo is at least in theory having some kind of effect on her Spanish skills (tal vez?), Alex has been thinking a lot over the past few weeks that she should start doing some daily writing. Meanwhile, Val has been a dedicated journaler for over a decade.

With that in mind, we propose creating a simple bullet-journaling app designed to be used at bedtime, which presents users with a prompt (What did you do today? What did you see, hear, feel and think about? Who did you talk to?) and a 10-minute timer for free-writing. Similar to Duolingo and the crossword app, it could gamify regular use, with gold stars on an archive calendar or something like that — but, and this part is really important, it wouldn’t reward extended use in any particular way.

We’d like it if there were some kind of community aspect to the journaling — like LiveJournal! — but we want to keep the emphasis on short, meaningful interaction with the app instead of endless, mindless scrolling. So we propose that after a user completes her day’s entry, she can see two more: one from a friend, and one from a random user somewhere else in the world. (Of course, the option to make posts private will be available.) Then that’s it: Time for bed.

Because the idea is to create a personal archive, users can go back and read their own entries any time they like, and even export them as a text file, but they can’t read previous entries by anyone else, to keep a sense of ephemerality about the whole business.

One slight snag we’re anticipating is that maybe the sense of quiet reflection the app inspires wouldn’t outweigh the blue-light exposure, sleep-wise. If anyone has feedback to address that issue, we’re all ears.

— Alex, Val and Romy

I. Introduction

For 25 consecutive business days, four times per year, about 17,000 players from all over the world gather online in the LearnedLeague, a private digital trivia competition. Each day’s match pairs players head-to-head, mostly with strangers, to answer a series of six difficult general knowledge questions. The goal is to win as many matches as possible in a given season. For this privilege, players pay $30 per year, after a free introductory season.

As digital communities go, LearnedLeague is, perhaps, unfashionable. The website is spartan and has not kept pace with contemporary trends in website design (modularity, infinite scroll); its capabilities do not serve much beyond gameplay. Message boards and a private-messaging function are used by few.

The site occupies an unusual space in the social-networking firmament. Most players I talked to are enthusiastic users — but spend very little time on the website itself. Rather, on a daily basis, users answer the day’s questions, generally in the morning, and then retreat to other, neutral communications platforms (SMS, email, WhatsApp) to discuss the questions with a small group of their real-life friends throughout the rest of the day. 

My research suggests that this usage pattern — a short burst of activity on the site in the morning, followed by a low-pressure and pleasant group chat elsewhere during the day — is generally very satisfying to players. It is driven by three aspects of LearnedLeague: the shared experience of answering each day’s questions, common to all players; the website’s comparative lack of functionality; and the referral-based nature of network growth. Most users I interviewed consider their relationships to LearnedLeague, and LearnedLeague itself, to be healthy.

Notes:
– Each measure represents one hour; a quarter note is 15 minutes.
– During chunks of time during which I was moving back and forth between two media (using a computer and writing on paper while doing homework, for instance; or listening to music and talking to friends while hosting a party), I alternated the chords in question, either quickly if the transitions felt fast or slowly if the transitions felt more fluid.
– Each chord is coded with a broad category as the lowest note and tweaks built on top:

• Any time I was having a conversation, the lowest note is middle C; other notes you might see for a conversation are D (for digital conversation), E (spoken aloud), F (with non-friends), G (with friends).
• Similarly, the base note for listening is D, tweaked with F for music, G for a lecture, A if it was for fun and B if it was mandatory. (A podcast counts as a fun lecture.)
• The base note for reading is E, tweaked with A for books, G for articles, B if it was for fun and high C if it was not for fun.
• The base note for watching is F, tweaked with A for TV, G for a movie, and C for exercise content.
• The base note for writing is G, tweaked with B for on paper, D for on a computer, and F if it was for a loved one. (An email is coded as writing, but texting is coded as a conversation.)
• The base note for other digital activity is A, tweaked with C for games, D for social media, and E for homework or other computer use.
• A bonus note, B, lives on its own and stands for walking around in the world.

– Here’s an audio file in case you’d like to hear what it sounds like. (Not very good!!) It was recorded at double speed because some of the extended blocks get a little boring in 4/4 time, and to keep the recording under two minutes.

Like a gas, noxious or otherwise, lack of phone expands to fit the space available. My partner and I both chose the lazy holiday Monday to complete this assignment, and although I probably needed my phone less than if we’d picked a busy day, I missed it more. There were more nooks of time for my awareness of phonelessness to slip into. 

That awareness, in fact, was pretty much unyielding. We talked so much about and around our phones! For 24 hours, Phone was the unseen character: Phone was Godot, Dulcinea, Maris Crane. We examined and appraised the phoneless experience at least as much as we lived it.

It was hard to separate out the mental and physical effects of being phoneless from the effects of knowing it was new; having anticipated ahead of time how it might feel; and actively wanting to be very attuned to what felt different. Weirdly, I felt I recognized this from other times a new sensory experience had involved a deliberate choice: “Am I laughing because I’m drunk, or am I laughing because I think drunk people laugh?”

To prepare for the assignment, I gave my family and a few friends — those most likely to be concerned if they got in touch and didn’t hear back — a heads-up that I’d be off the grid. Although I didn’t communicate with any of them during the phoneless day, I did end up feeling a little closer to them, because the feeling that I ought to send them this alert was itself a nice reminder that there are people in my life who care about my safety. But I think this was a one-time, temporary-only benefit; all those same people would be very annoyed if I chose to make phonelessness a permanent state. (I have enough friends who have dated stubborn Luddites to know this is true.)

Although there’s obviously and indisputably an element of compulsion that underlies how we interact with our phones, I think we need to be very careful about our willingness to draw a parallel with addiction. For one thing, it minimizes the very real, or at least metaphorizes the very literal, danger of physical addictions — no matter how much time you spend scrolling Facebook, that action is never going to kill you. And for another, I think the pervasiveness of phone compulsion as it’s often commonly understood begs an explanation at the population level, not the individual one. Maybe epidemiology has more answers to offer.

That said, I also didn’t feel that my impulses to check my phone felt like an addict’s cravings on any more than a fleeting, surface level. I hope I’m not kidding myself about this, but the discomfort truly didn’t feel like it came from being denied tiny dopamine hits. Rather, a better comparison might be that it felt like I was walking around all day with the fingers of one hand Superglued together. Throughout the day, confronted with all sorts of minor inconveniences, I was painfully aware that there existed a tool that could erase them — and I couldn’t use it. 

In the end, I think what surprised me most was how wrong I was about some of the assumptions I’ve always made about how my phone both smoothes and disrupts my life. My estimation of my phone’s effect on my attention span has been more dire than perhaps it needed to be. When I was a child and teenager, before smartphones, I could easily pass three or four hours reading without thinking anything of it. These days, I find it almost impossible to spend even a half-hour concentrating on text without reflexively checking my phone, and I’ve made an additional habit of bemoaning this state of affairs whenever the topic of The Phonedom Menace comes up at a party or whatever. But on Monday, I settled into some reading — and not even fun reading, economics reading — and had no problem at all focusing for several hours. Somehow knowing that looking at my phone wasn’t a possibility also eliminated the impulse, which was an extremely pleasant surprise.

Reading wasn’t the only thing that turned out better than I’d imagined it would. At one point, my partner couldn’t remember a fleeting bit of trivia — “Who sings that song,” he asked, “that goes, like, ‘Ooohhhh, yeah’?”* I couldn’t answer the question but could contribute a little additional information: “It’s about how the moon is beautiful but the sun is even more beautiful,” I offered. 

As a committed pedant, I’d always imagined that a moment like this, without a phone, would feel infuriating. But instead, we just smiled, shrugged and moved on.

* The song, a masterpiece, is by Yello.