Fixing Social Media

Whereas I cannot say that I am a candidate for joining the ‘Back to the Flip Phone’ movement, living without a phone for 24 hours made me realize that I am not as dependent on it as I thought. Perhaps we can say I am independent enough from my phone to not warrant going back to get it if I forgot it at home. 

This exercise challenged me to think about my relationship with my phone in three main ways:

• The artifact that is my phone. I have made choices that ensure it a space in my daily routines and physical proximity to me always: the case I bought for it stores my MIT ID, which is also my Charlie Card, and my credit card. Most days, I can go out with my phone and not even need a wallet. The phone itself is one of the smaller iPhones that I purchased new in 2016, after careful research on battery life, with the intention to keep a small phone for as long as possible — or long after phone makers phased out the small phones. It fits comfortably within all the pockets of my clothing.
  
• What my phone does provide and could not be easily substituted. Outside of obvious communications functions, the only challenge that my phone is very good at solving without needing much research or planning is the mess that is the Boston transport system. At the same time, having grown up in a city where standing for long enough (less than five minutes) at a stop is all you need to ride on the bus or the metro, I cannot understand how people used the MBTA before smartphones with live updates. I could perhaps go back to a flip phone in Mexico City, but certainly not in Boston. Living without a phone for 24 hours meant that I had to change my transportation decisions in a way that reduced the unreliability but lengthened the commute. I did not have to go to new places, which I find would have been much harder without access to the maps.
  
• Perhaps unsurprisingly, staying entertained, which is ultimately the main way I use my phone, was not a challenge. Perhaps I missed the ability to listen to music and take photos during my commutes, but I cannot say that I was bored. In this point, I can add that, in parallel to me not using the phone for 24 hours, I aimed to reduce the screen time of two kids under my care. Removing the tablets from their beds meant that, when they woke up, they were peacefully keeping themselves entertained with self-talk and daydreaming in their bed — not wrecking the room as I had predicted. 

I think that the framing of phone usage and addiction is loaded with moral panics with bizarre groundings (when exactly does phone usage become “unhealthy?”), and I see it as language that ultimately erases the struggles of individuals who have been diagnosed with addiction to substances. We see a similar panic in the parenting spheres online: fears around screen time and cognitive decay in children, much of it refuted by youth and media research. At the same time, there are times I wish I used my phone less, simply because I do mindlessly consume a lot of content that, in my mind, does not lead to quality relaxation. This exercise has encouraged me to be more active in looking for the limits that most resonate with my intentions.

Written after an assignment to not use your phone for 24 hours

We live in an age in which we are all cyborgs (see e.g. Haraway 2015). While we may not have implants (although a growing number of us now endure orthodontics or are aided by pins, staples, or pacemakers), our phones are, for all intents and purposes, an extension of our bodies. They may be physically glued to our hands, strapped to our wrists or our arms, or in a pocket or bag so intimately close that we can feel the notification vibrations. Sometimes we, myself included, feel that vibration when it isn’t there, like a phantom phone limb. This state of being is often decried by the public as undesirable and even dangerous, the critiques purporting a kind of Romantic era back-to-nature sentiment, as if we could just rewind to a pre-cyborgian “natural” state of being. But I happen to like my cyborg self and spending 24 hours without my phone in my default world (i.e. not on a remote island without internet or electricity, which I have done, and it was a wonderful experience for other reasons) was challenging in interesting ways.

The first thing I noticed was a loss of certain abilities my cyborg self usually thinks nothing of. For example, when I was grocery shopping and couldn’t remember if we had eggs and capers at home, I couldn’t call my husband to check. I bought both, and now we have one set of eggs but two jars of capers. Later in the evening I did a load of laundry, which is in the basement of my building. I usually set a timer on my phone so I know when it’s done, and ended up resorting to the oven timer. I also lost my rapid access to information. Checking the weather to see how many layers to wear and what hours UPS was open took a little longer since I had to pull out my laptop. Finally, I noticed myself making a mental list of people I wanted to message about small things that didn’t seem worthy of an email: telling my mom I made one of our favorite foods, asking a friend to have dinner, getting photos from my sister’s weekend trip. Little interactions that aren’t life-altering but important for maintaining relationships especially when friends and family are scattered around the world. And sometimes there are bigger things–I specifically didn’t start this assignment until recently because last week an older family member had a bad fall and went to the hospital. At that point I needed to be in touch.

But what about the addiction and mindless scrolling we so often hear about? Instagram is the only form of social media I use regularly, and I do at times find myself scrolling through photos of mountains, cozy interiors, and street style. There are moments when I do this on purpose, and there are moments when I just pick up my phone while waiting in line and, all of a sudden, I realize I’m on Instagram. Although there is a lot of social pressure to feel guilty about this, I try not to. I enjoy the social media accounts I follow. I did find, though, that my 24-hour break lessened my, at times, unconscious instinct to reach for my phone. I ended up adjusting some of my notifications in order to decrease this instinct a little further. I am happy to conceptualize my phone as part of my physical self, but it should tell me when it actually needs my attention.

I strongly dislike the term addiction in this context because I think it is extremely disrespectful towards people who have medical addictions that can destroy their lives, such as an opioid or alcohol addiction. A better phrase is “automaticity” (see e.g. LaRose 2010), or the idea that picking up your phone can be an automatic habit, but this does not constitute an addiction in the medical sense because it doesn’t significantly alter your life in a negative way. Another way to think about the difference between looking up directions on Google Maps and scrolling on Instagram is “Uses and Gratifications Theory” (UGT). UGT separates media consumption into two categories: instrumental and ritualized. Instrumental consumption is goal-oriented, often with the aim of collecting a specific piece of information. Ritualized consumption is more passive and habitual, gratifying “companionship, entertainment, personal identity, escape” (Joo and Sang 2013). Joo and Sang (2013) and Hiniker, Patel, Kohno, and Kientz (2016) each document how smartphone uses can be separated into instrumental and ritualized uses.

What I find particularly interesting is trying to understand where the massive guilt from ritualized smartphone use comes in. Like diet fads, people put themselves through all sorts of digital detoxes, similar to the one we did for this assignment (see e.g. Baym, Wagman, and Persaud, in press). Adam Alter, author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, makes a comment in a New York Times interview that sums up many of the complaints we often hear: “If you’re on the phone for three hours daily, that’s time you’re not spending on face-to-face interactions with people. Smartphones give everything you need to enjoy the moment you’re in, but they don’t require much initiative. You never have to remember anything because everything is right in front of you. You don’t have to develop the ability to memorize or to come up with new ideas.” However, I can think of numerous ways my phone has enhanced my in-person relationships, especially with people who live far away from me, as well as enabled my creativity.

While I think an “always-on” mentality can be punishing at times and that we need both technical mechanisms for controlling our smartphone usage in ways that make us feel empowered as well as social norms that allow for delayed responses, I think we can tackle these problems while fully embracing our cyborg state of being.

References

Baym, Nancy, Kelly Wagman, and Christopher Persaud. In press. “Mindfully Scrolling: Rethinking Facebook After Time Deactivated.” Social Media and Society.  

Dreifus, Claudia. 2017. “Why We Can’t Look Away From Our Screens.” The New York Times.

Haraway, Donna. 2015. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge.

Hiniker, Alexis, Shwetak N. Patel, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Julie A. Kientz. 2016. “Why Would You Do That? Predicting the Uses and Gratifications Behind Smartphone-Usage Behaviors.” In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 634–645. UbiComp ’16. New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2971648.2971762.

Joo, Jihyuk, and Yoonmo Sang. 2013. “Exploring Koreans’ Smartphone Usage: An Integrated Model of the Technology Acceptance Model and Uses and Gratifications Theory.” Computers in Human Behavior 29 (6): 2512–2518. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2013.06.002.

LaRose, Robert. 2010. “The Problem of Media Habits.” Communication Theory 20 (2): 194–222. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01360.x.

I’ll admit that from the moment I saw this assignment on the syllabus, I was dreading the day I would have to switch off my phone and survive in the world “unplugged” for a day. Of course, I still had my laptop, but I knew ahead of time that my phone really comprised the bulk of how I work, play, and communicate in a day. Going phoneless would mean a day without scrolling through Instagram, without Toon Blast (my guilty pleasure game for those awkward pockets of time before class or a meeting), without Snap stories or dumb Buzzfeed quizzes.

However, what really surprised me about this assignment is that those things weren’t really what I missed at all.

It all began when I woke up. Without an alarm, I (thankfully) woke up 30 minutes earlier than my typical wakeup time and decided not to push my luck by trying for those 30 extra minutes. I then prepared to head to my dorm’s gym, where I encountered my first real surprise of the day: I use my phone to listen to music while I exercise. Deciding I couldn’t endure 30 minutes of staring at the wall in silence, I grabbed a book and headed downstairs. Reading a physical copy of Game of Thrones while on the treadmill honestly felt like a bizarre experience, and I got at least a few odd glances while I worked out.

My next unpleasant encounter occurred as I bundled up to head to a lab meeting. My dorm is about a 20 minute walk from my lab, and I typically use that time to call one (or both) of my parents, who live in Kentucky and with whom I talk every day. Walking that 20 minutes in silence was somewhat boring, and talking on the phone was always a nice distraction from the construction and honking horns on Mass. Ave., but I found that more than anything I missed the ritual of chatting with them about my plans for the day or something funny that had occurred in class the day prior. 

My frustrations continued throughout the day. Admittedly, I chose this particular day (a Tuesday) because it’s my busiest day of the week: I’m in a lab meeting from morning until the early afternoon, and then in back-to-back classes until 9 PM. I thought the amount of time in meetings and class would lessen the blow of not having my phone. But instead I found the opposite to be true: On such a busy day, my natural inclination was to reach for my phone to text a funny incident to my boyfriend or Snap a random thought to my friends. Digging out my laptop to text or use Facebook Messenger on my computer was a hassle when I was on the go. 

After getting out of class that night, my final task of the day was to retrieve a plant from a friend’s house, as she had been taking care of it while I was gone for IAP. I walked with her to her apartment and then decided to take the T home. However, as a Cambridge newbie (I just moved here in August) I still get the train lines confused and usually Google directions to remember if I’m going inbound or outbound. Without my phone, I had to rely on my (notoriously poor) memory and just make a choice. Thankfully, I chose the correct train and made it home, though the trip felt strange without music in my headphones.

At the outset of this assignment I expected to miss things like social media and games – and to an extent, I did. But I discovered that the things I missed most were those that connected me to those I cared about, like phone calls and group chats; opportunities to listen to music (this activity helped me realize what an important role music plays in my daily life!); and more functional aspects of cell phones like alarms and GPS. I certainly use my phone a lot, and maybe I am addicted to it. But I feel like another definition might be more appropriate. In his book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan says that any medium is actually an extension of our senses and therefore our bodies. This definition feels more appropriate to me. Do I use my phone to look at memes and play games with cartoon animals? Certainly. But I also use it as an extension of myself – to add background music, and therefore mood, to my nightly walks to my dorm; to be present in the daily lives of my parents and my boyfriend, even when I can’t be there physically; to quickly search for a fact I couldn’t remember or the correct way to get home. My phone has become so embedded in my daily life that it truly feels like an extension of myself. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing has not yet been determined.