Author: emmaoh

My media diary is forcing me to declare something I already know to be true but don’t want to admit…my email has quietly become the air traffic controller of my life. 

I spent the vast majority of my time consuming and transmitting bits of media from my email. This was accompanied by similar activities in my messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Apple Messages and Facebook Messenger) and undergirded by a number of Google Forms, Docs, Slides and Sheets I was constantly diving in my Drive to retrieve and tinker with. 

On the bright side, the internet has brought the great gift of streaming TV of which I partake in hearty dosages when I am worn out by my email driven exercises. It’s a vicious and screen-heavy cycle. But I do believe it is the golden era of television and I am enjoying it. This week alone, I enjoyed a number of episodes of two comedies: In the Long Run (an Amazon Prime show about an immigrant family from Sierra Leone in the UK created by Idris Elba) and Big Mouth (a Netflix animated series about the woes of middle school and puberty). I watched my usual mediocre but ritually comforting TV dramas on Hulu that release an episode a week: The Bold Type (twenty-somethings working for a magazine in NYC and wearing cute but definitely uncomfortable outfits), Good Trouble (twenty-somethings living in a co-op in LA) and good ol’ Grey’s Anatomy. Lastly, I watched a smattering of movies on Amazon Prime: Morning Glory (skip it), The Last Black Man in San Francisco (watch it!) and re-watched Lost In Translation (a classic). This was several hours more streaming than usual attributed to being sick on my couch for a good part of the weekend. I like to think if I was feeling better, several of these hours would have been spent doing something outside possibly in the company of others but they could’ve easily been spent making the Google Docs bubble bigger.

I also read a bit for fun (The Three Body Problem, a Chinese sci-fi novel), which does not usually happen when school is in session beyond a little reading before bed (currently a chapter of Little Women each night) and again was attributed to my illness. It felt strange to be reading a book and not an article and moreover for it not to be for class or my thesis. I used to devour books as a child and absolutely see a shift towards reading less as the internet has played a bigger role in my life.

My news consumption was minimal and has been since Trump was elected. I read through the NYT updates that get stored up in my notifications center (push alerts are turned off) every few days, skim a couple tech news briefs and sometimes read articles sent to me by friends, family and colleagues. I also Google information when my interest is piqued by class reading or conversations and read articles this way. I also have been following the coronavirus outbreak in Italy via the New York Times since I am supposed to be leading a trip in Rome over spring break.

Perhaps I can develop strategies that make it feel less like I am muddling through email and the Google Suite all day everyday. Total extraction seems impossible but I did expect graduate school to have way more reading and way less email than it does. 

I have spent over a year now very intentionally trying to build what I call a, “healthier relationship with my technology”. I’ve deleted most major social media apps, regularly monitor my screen time counter and banished my cellie from my bedroom at nighttime. Nevertheless, most of the cringey parts of my tech relations still point back to my cell phone.  

I currently own (yes, own, now that I’ve finished paying the very long series of car-note like payments to my carrier) an iPhone 8. I am not motivated to upgrade to a flashier version that scans my face to unlock…I have even made a few half-hearted attempts to revert back to a flip phone. In my quest to return to the mobile phone dark ages, I’ve mostly received weird looks from major phone retailer employees in addition to an offhand comment about seeming like a drug dealer. Point is, a day without my cell phone is welcome and much easier to do now that 1. I no longer work for an Internet company and 2. I’ve been practicing this distance for some time. Nevertheless, I found three instances where my hands were tied in my daily goings-on without my iAppendage. 

🏦Online Banking

Most of the day went swimmingly without my phone. That is because most of what I presently use my cell phone for can be done on my laptop: email and messaging via Apple Messages (friends) and Facebook Messenger (parents). I didn’t hit my first snag until well into the afternoon when I tried to sign into my online Bank of America account. For some reason, my device wasn’t recognized (likely because I usually do my online banking via the app…on my phone) and asked for two step verification by calling or texting my cell phone. Fortunately, the transaction was not urgent and could wait until another day.

📵Communication: WhatsApp, Contact List, Tardiness

While I could access the majority of the platforms I use to communicate via my laptop, WhatsApp is only accessible on a laptop when connected to a cell phone. It basically projects the information from your phone to the laptop or web client. This lack of access translated to some extra email traffic, so I did have a (less convenient) alternative. 

I found myself stymied by a shortage of contacts on my laptop. I could not find the number of someone I wanted to text from my laptop that is stored in my cell phone. This is a problem that can easily be overcome.

Lastly, I was going to be late to an event (and I was bringing the burritos so kind of a big deal…) and had to rely on my co-organizer to let the group know we were running behind and would be there soon. In the end, we were actually on time and it would have been fine but it is a good example of how important cell phones can be when trying to coordinate with real humans in meatspace. 

💭Information Recall: Time and Space

The last instance of inconvenience was not being able to remember location details for an event I was telling a friend about. Normally, I would’ve simply pulled up the details on my phone. This is a good example of the ways technology serves as a means to outsourcing memory. I also found myself not knowing what time it was most of the day. This would have been much more disturbing during the week when I often depend on my phone to know the time and my Google Calendar to know where I’m supposed to be. I often found myself just opening my laptop to check what time it was. My cell phone is absolutely my compass through the unnatural, neoliberal urban landscape I exist in and the manmade structures, like time, that mediate it.

It’s important to note that I performed this exercise on a Sunday. Weekends, unsurprisingly, are considerably slower for me than weekdays. I would have likely had many more moments of wishing I had my phone in the harried rush of life around here if I had gone a M-F without my phone. Even with my slower pace, my phone’s absence allowed me to more clearly see some of the “Hijacks” Tristan Harris has named, particularly #3 Fear of Missing Something Important and #7 Instant Interruption.

When I have my cell phone around me, I find myself blindly picking it up to check for notifications such as messages or new emails. I conduct a habituated flow of movements through a set of apps: open Outlook, open Gmail, open WhatsApp, open Messenger, double tap home button close all to repeat in 5 minutes…beyond some deep Pavlovian conditioning, I find this behavior hard to explain. There is nothing of such importance coming through my phone on a regular basis that justifies this behavior. It reveals how deeply the device is an object I interact with in my most basic humanoid state. There is nothing intelligent about this choreography. It is an ugly, simple dance that I just can’t seem to stop repeating. 

What I like most about leaving my cell phone behind is that I feel like I somewhat return to the driver seat in my life. With my cell phone, I am a reactive passenger from the moment I wake up, step into my living room and do the first rep of cycling through my apps. My thoughts and often actions are driven by the information, questions and (sometimes literal) directions coming from my mobile device. The way I use it, my cell phone is a gaping hole of unfettered access to my attention. I effortlessly remain in this mode of receiving and reacting all day.