Weren’t You?

“Put that phone down!”

It’s for your own good. One could even say it’s for your phone good but that doesn’t mean one should say that. But phone addiction is a real phenomenon.

Addiction, surprisingly, has a low bar, as far as meeting the definition.

To wit:

Addiction is characterized by inability to consistently abstain, impairment in behavioral control, craving, diminished recognition of significant problems with one’s behaviors and interpersonal relationships, and a dysfunctional emotional response.
(via https://www.asam.org/resources/definition-of-addiction)

A low bar is hard in the limbo and it also ain’t good for being addiction to something.

And addiction is never good Captain Obvious. Never. Even if you are addicted to cereal with a ton of fiber.

Why?

See the definition above and know that by definition, addiction doesn’t come without "significant problems.”

Even if the problems result from something that started out as seemingly innocuous, like high-fiber cereal or…getting a cell phone.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people and cell phones in and of themselves aren’t bad or evil or worthy of becoming a luddite but, again, addiction, ahem, ain’t good.

And people are addicted to their phones.

I see it in the classes when I teach; college students either itching to look at their phones or flat out looking at their phones while the world could burn down around them.

Now knowing that addiction requires the preposition “to” and that the noun to which one is addicted, matters, a lot, the thing that really frightens me about cell phone addiction is best expressed by Questlove Thompson:

"Dare I hesitate to say that creativity might be in jeopardy because one of the key components of being creative is boredom and silence and isolation."
(via https://www.npr.org/2018/05/01/600852801/questlove-aims-to-save-your-brain-creativity-might-be-in-jeopardy)

Cell Phone = no boredom, no silence, and no isolation.

You do the math.

Just don’t use your phone to do the math because we both know that will turn into the fall down the rabbit hole of checking your apps and tweeting and instagramming and pokemoning and tweeting about pokemining and the next thing you know it’s time for bed and your brain won’t shut off because of all the blue light and there is after all a new Netflix show you can stream till 6am upon which you will enter tomorrow zombie-like and…

You see? How it dominoes?

And all those dominoes falling could be the
[record scratch]
death
[woman screams]
of
[audience gasps into hot, very hot, condenser mic]
creativity.

And what do you think led to the cell phone that will be the death of creativity?

You guessed it: boredom, silence, and isolation.

I think we’re in the upside down Toto. [mixed reference = grade of A+]

So set a weekly schedule, set a daily timer, make it a reward, moderate usage via an app, but remember that the will needs practice and…

PUT THAT PHONE DOWN!

We need you to put that phone down. You were meant for bigger things than snapchat.

Weren’t you?



via GIPHY

Don't Want To Say I Told You So

But I will.

Remember in this blog how I asked:

But what will we do when technology can truly mask the giver of the information or simulate the authenticity of the giver of the information?

Remember how you scoffed, yes scoffed, at me?

You scoffed. Admit it. You scoffed with full and complete scoffedness.

Behold scoffer of men!

They asked faculty at Dartmouth College to predict the future.

Please proceed to The Death Of Credibility. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

blue void

What of this softening of the species? What of these humans that used to torture cats for entertainment who now want women to be able to marry women; what with all of their emotional intelligence?

What if the species grows soft but also can’t focus.

What of the luddites and those who withheld from the phones and the google and the screens and the digital world for a world of paper and soil and fire and sheepshanks and bricklaying and all the matter that really matters? Their minds attentive for hours at a time, their focus honed and keen for the slightest drop or change or nuance…yes nuance; they don’t need to be hit over the head for they are finely tuned and attuned unlike us, you and me, staring into the blue void and the mindless swiping in a digital love that renders us blank and brain-drooling and so desensitized to the stuff of stuff and the matter that matters that we don’t…notice, never do…the differences that aren’t digital as we fall the down that ones and zeroes rabbit hole for hours and hours and hours at a time numb as we fall, our brains flitting like hummingbird wings from this to that mindless, truly mindless soundbite and substance-free meme and sugar-laden a la cart idea that we agree and agree and agree with and contrast becomes vile never neutral and it becomes alarming and threatening because we’ve tailored and tailored and pruned and selected from the hits only those things we want to hear and feel and eat and know, especially know, over and over and over and we will not fight personal bias. Will not look in a mirror, will not question…who has time? I just got a text and it agrees with me and me with it and it soothes me, waves me back in from the matter that matters…and I look and the blue void calls to me and knows what I think I need which is what I need because perception is reality now and what were those people thinking thinking otherwise?

Letting Being Be

Barret on Heidegger on Technology:

“The word “object” is itself instructive here: it is from the Latin ob-jectum, that which is thrown or put before – hence, an obstacle that has to be conquered, manipulated, transformed. Man masters beings, but Being – the open region in which both subject and object stand out and are thus not divided is forgotten. There is left to man nothing but his Will to power over objects."

“The man of today, technological man, is the final descendant of Cartesian man,…locked up in his own luminous ego, confronted a world of material objects as thoroughly alien and perhaps unknowable, so technological man faces the objects in his world with no need or capacity for intimacy with them beyond the knowledge of what button has to be pressed in order to control their working.” 

…Western man has got to fetch Being back from the oblivion into which it has fallen. Man must learn to let Being be.”

Barrett Considers Art:

“But do all the military metaphors (Nietzschean Will to Power) show us the other side of art? Do they convey to us that the artist, as well as the spectator, must submit patiently and passively to the artistic process, that he must lie in wait for the image to produce itself; that he produces false notes as soon as he tries to force anything; that in short, he must let the truth of his art happen to him? All of these points are part of what Heidegger means by our letting Being be.”

I don’t think I’m technophobic or a Luddite; just trying to find the physical and mental space to create.

Doesn’t it seem like the phone and google could be getting in the way?

Guiding Metaphor

A few points from Steven Pinker's book: Sense of Style: the thinking person's guide to writing in the 21st century.

 

"In classic prose the writer is directing the gaze of the reader to something in the world she can see for herself. Classic style minimizes abstractions, which cannot be seen with the naked eye. This doesn’t mean that it avoids abstract subject matter, only that it shows the events making up that subject matter transparently, by narrating an unfolding plot with real characters doing things, rather than by naming an abstract concept that encapsulates those events in a single word."

Me: Show it, don’t word it.

"The guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader’s gaze to something in the world."

"Classic style makes the unnatural act of writing seem like two of our most natural acts: talking and seeing."

So let's try it out:

Plot: technology erodes feeling and emotion, instantaneous technology 

She swiped, then she swiped some more, almost walked into a street sign which almost interrupted her swiping, almost. When she wasn’t swiping, she was checking and when she wasn’t checking she was thinking about checking. She knew how and where to get information by swiping. She could find the best site to help you learn about elm trees but she had no interest in touching, smelling, sitting under an elm tree, embracing its shade, maybe with a friend talking about boys or maybe even with that boy she talked about, maybe even sneaking a kiss under that elm tree. She had no interests in sensing things outside pixilation. Her attention span mirrored the time between swipes. Seconds from swipe, look, swipe, tap, expand, look, swipe, tap tap, both thumbs, open video, swipe, check, swipe... for hours upon hours. For fourteen years she swiped and checked, checked and swiped as the world outside her was ignored. She didn’t take in a sunset though she lived near the water, she had her eyes glued to the phone; she didn’t really remember important events because she had her eyes glued to the phone; parties and the memories of them were usurped by selfies and real-time posting. Nostalgia became a thing of the present.