I realized that our relationship with technology is complicated after spending 24 hours away from my phone. I never noticed all the functionality we put into modern smartphones. In the mornings I like to use my smartphone as an alarm clock. But because I couldn’t use mine, I ended up oversleeping and waking up hours after my intended time.
Even after waking up, I prefer to exercise, then shower while playing music and couldn’t do either of those things. I ended up making accommodations by not making any. I did use my laptop in supplementary ways, such as checking the weather and calling my mom who had called me earlier in the day.
At one point, I was doing laundry and MIT recently installed the Washlava application. It’s only a mobile app so I had to find someone in my dorm and ask if they could reserve a machine for me on their smartphones. That was interesting. In that way, not having a smartphone forced me to be more social, but I could tell the person I asked was very confused about why I didn’t have my smartphone and in that way, norms indirectly affects our behaviors.
I don’t know if addiction is the right way to describe not having our phone. I did feel extremely calm walking around. I prefer to play music while walking during the day but I couldn’t, so I listened to the sounds of the cars, other people, and nature. That was refreshing in its own ways. I was definitely more present in my everyday actions. However, I did notice a phantom syndrome of wondering where my phone was because I couldn’t feel it pressing against my body. I never noticed how often I would feel it. While I liked not having my phone, it also really limits all the things I can do at a given time. It constrains my actions and makes me not as connected to the web, which in today’s society, is not good.
At another point, I headed to meet a friend for dinner. Yet because I didn’t have my smartphone, I couldn’t check where he was as I set out to the dinner place. I also couldn’t call an Uber because that’s a smartphone app. When I showed up, my friend was already there and had been waiting for ten minutes (I was running late). I felt irresponsible for not letting him know I was late.
At night, I like to scroll through Reddit/Facebook while falling asleep, but couldn’t do that. It felt weird to be surrounded by my thoughts for the first time in a long time. I kept wondering if something important was happening and I felt like I would miss it because I wasn’t there. It’s interesting because I disable all notifications for email and social media on my smartphone, so I would classify myself as a more distant user of technology. Yet I felt like I didn’t have control over technology because it was so far away from me.