Tag: Assignment 1

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.

Finding a time to do this proved challenging. I had to wait for my husband to get back to the US since I have a child in school and after school so I am on call for any emergency. I don’t have a land line. I just started a part time job and my desk phone doesn’t work. Then my shower started leaking to the apartment below and the tile man has rescheduled twice. 

The Monday holiday was the day and my husband will be home to meet him, and he originally called so that’s the phone number the guy has. Going out with a kid and no cell phone seemed risky.  Luckily she just got her first journal with a little padlock on it and is really into reading, so some reading and writing will make up part of the day.  

I turned off the phone as soon as we successfully met friends for dinner out Sunday night.  They were texting until the minute they walked into the restaurant. I had given my parents, brother and best friend my husbands phone number for emergencies, even though most of the day today my daughter and I were out and about without any way to reach us.

After our dinner out with friends Sunday night, we came home and brushed our teeth and instead of looking at Twitter and letting her watch a video I invited my daughter to read with me in the bed.  We sat together and both read two chapters of our books.  Then I tucked her into her bed and she went to sleep more peacefully than usual. 

I realized that I would have to have my husband wake me up, he would still set an alarm on his phone. I discovered last April that all 4 travel alarm clocks I owned were broken in different ways, the last one when it went off at the wrong time and wouldn’t stop during the middle of the night.

We went to the Museum of Science first thing in the morning, before the tile guy came to fix the shower.  At the museum we stopped by the members ticket booth to get tickets for a 4D show (in addition to 3D you get wet and, as it turns out, get kicked in the back by a frog), and then went straight to the new Dogs exhibit before it got totally crowded.  It was pretty good, the first part is a sort of archaeological dig where the kids unearth skeletons of humans and dogs living together 12 thousand years ago.  One of the main things to do is find all 12 scents hidden throughout the exhibit, so you experience it like a dog.

We quickly discovered that by leaving my phone at home, we also had no camera.  Twice she asked me to take a photo and the first time I realize this, and the second I reminded her. 

We went to the cafeteria for lunch at 11am hoping to beat the crowd, everyone else had the same idea so it was already a line out the door.  We got a lot of food to share and mixed a bunch of sodas at the self serve fountain.  We got seats by the window, though mine faced a wall.

After lunch, we went down to the basement to take part in an engineering challenge.  By now we were used to not being able to photograph our results, luckily they gave her a magnet to remember her participation.  I found out that she has two other such magnets so far this year, installed in her school locker.

We went to the lobby Starbucks for a quick coffee and dippin dots and sat and watched the kinetic sculpture for an hour.

Then we got our jackets out of the locker and went to the T. We just missed one so there was a long wait and she asked to go “on your notebook” and wrote about how bored she was and “I hate this class”.

We took the T to Copley and walked down Newbury Street to Trident where I had a pre-ordered book I hadn’t picked up for a week.  She read 3 picture books in the kids area while I looked at books in nearby sections, then we got drinks and an ice cream sandwhich in the upstairs part of the café. She was very upset I wouldn’t buy a toy to play with (“since we don’t have your phone”) I wrote out tick tack toe as soon as we sat down, and then she drew out hang man.

She suddenly saw a giant chapter book she’d heard of and decided to buy it.  Then we went to Newbury Comics and got a graphic novel. We couldn’t find the pay phone that had been suggested to me, so we took the T home.  I showed her a broken down pay phone on the main street near our apartment and showed her the emergency call box that is still in operation, and was used to report a fire a few months ago when the 911 system was down.

Back home, I read some of the Sunday NY times I’d saved and some of the book I’d been reading last night and she read her graphic novel.  It was relaxing not checking my phone.  When I finally turned it back on, there were no calls or voicemails missed, or even texts. I am about to check Twitter but I have no desire to check Facebook.  I also realize that I check Twitter just to have something to read and I’m just as happy with a book or magazine. 

In the end it may be more about society than the individual.  Not being able to find a pay phone to make a single check in phone call was a bit ridiculous.  I’m glad to know that the emergency call boxes are still there, and in use, since these interim backup systems I recall from the past, like pay phones, and people having land lines and voicemail to check, are truly gone now.  It was different doing this challenge with my kid along and partly through her eyes, but in the end she got into it to and didn’t even get “on her ipad” until after dinner tonight.

It was an interesting experience for me overall since I realised how little my phone is of use to me and how much I've spent on purchasing this device in the past five to seven years. I had planned a list of activities that I will be doing on this day without my phone, from cleaning my room, doing laundry to finishing class assignments. But most importantly, I had to come up with unusual ways of communicating with my long distance family and partner. Planning being my forte helps me get through things smoothly and so, I was well prepared and geared up to take on this challenge of experiencing phone detox for twenty-four hours.

Throughout the day, I spoke to my partner through Skype and that turned out to be a much better experience than WhatsApp or Google Duo. On Skype, we could share screens and hence we worked, critiqued each other's assignments and watched a movie together. It was an enjoyable date that I never saw coming. I felt like we could connect at a deeper level with respect to the kind of work we put into our assignments. The power of screen sharing proved to be magical for us. I could do everything on my laptop other than WhatsApp, and the people who mattered to me the most (who I talk to on a daily basis) were already informed about my little detox activity. This helped me resolve my anxiety.

While a phone is definitely a conveninvent device and since it was a 1 day thing I didn't mind not using it. But on the hindsight, playing music on the laptop while cooking, or even talking to my partner on Skype while cooking was a bit difficult because of the size of it. I was struggling with placing the laptop right without damaging it. Sound matters to me a lot and I had feared initially that my laptop wouldn't give me that level of music experience as my phone, but to my surprise, it was pretty good. So, I was happy to discover something new about my laptop on this day. Even though I watch movies on it at full volume I never got to compare the sound quality until now. This was a happy feeling and just when I thought I could get by the day easily, it was laundry time. 

My phone is what gets me by when I'm doing laundry and not having it by my side did scare me. I had carried a book to read, to pass twenty-eight whole minutes while my clothes were getting washed. But, I just wasn't able to read in that environment, it was noisy and made me feel uncomfortable. Time suddenly stopped for me and I started thinking about how I would've been sitting here with my phone and watching some Shazeb Sheikh (dance) videos instead. To get over those thoughts I started walking around the area just to curb my boredom. It was tough but I made it. This is when I realized the need to be entertained all the time and how my phone would assist me with that. Eventually, my mind started overthinking and it led to depressing thoughts. Fortunately, it didn't last long since the laundry was done by then.

The day was going as planned and connecting with my partner differently spiced things up in our relationship. Moreover, since I've stopped using social media, it was a relaxing experience for me overall. Besides, I'm not a techno savvy person, hence this phone detox day helped me understand the differences and importances of the gadgets I own. I also took the day to organize my thoughts and saw that I could spend time with myself and it wasn't as scary as I had thought it would be. 

I had planned activities for the day, but had completely forgotten about the night when I set an alarm to wake me up. Since I didn't have my phone to rely on, I felt incomplete and uncertain. But then I somehow liked the thrill element attached to this. This would test how much I am in routine if I sleep at the same time that I do every night. Next morning, when I woke up, I was very anxious to check the time on the analog clock. To my excitement and relief, I found that I had woken up at the exact same time that I do every day even without the alarm. So I decided to delete my alarm and try waking up on my own for the coming week to see if I could eliminate the need for it completely. This was one of the most empowered feelings I've had lately. 

To sum up my experience, I would like to conclude by saying that while it freaked me out by just thinking about the fact that I won't be able to speak to my loved ones,  I realized that alternatives are always there and to my luck even better! Also, I overcame my fear of losing touch with my loved ones and came out feeling strong and energetic.