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.