What has happened? I remember purchasing my first mobile phone when I was a senior in high school back in 1991–1992. It was a bag phone then, and the cost was prohibitive to use it for more than a few minutes at a time. For those not familiar with a bag phone, it was a hybrid between a handset with a cord and the actual cell mechanism housed with the battery in a bag about half the size of a loaf of bread. Since then, the phones have largely evolved into the supercomputer in one's hand that entertains us, organizes us, connects us, reminds us, and is often a required tool for our work environments.
A number of things culminated to cause me to pause, yet again, on the reliance — and, dare I say, dependency — on the cell phone. More broadly, I could say the dependency on technology in general, but the cell phone certainly is generally the central figure in our access and use of technology.
It isn't really about the phone
The cell phone in and of itself is just one part of the story. The applications that are frequently used are another matter entirely. Apps such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, news feeds, and other forms of social media are meticulously and strategically created and managed to foster vying for an ever-precious resource: our attention. It is this attention that has suffered decades of influence from an engagement economy, where companies and marketing experts realized that consumers' attention is ever so much harder to come by due to all the competition grasping for it. The attention of Americans has gradually declined to what has become, from my perspective, a crisis.
Why a crisis?
Let me try to succinctly explore this. The following will be too dense to cover in just this blog, so I will touch the tip of the iceberg and then go deeper in future posts.
- Culture has laid out rules for cell phone use now. Texts should be answered almost immediately. To not do so can make the receiver feel guilt or stress, and the sender wonder why it is taking so long for a response to their text.
- People are too busy to listen to a voicemail, it seems. People don't leave them, and users don't feel they "have time" to listen to one. "So just don't leave one. Text me instead."
- We feel highly anxious — almost paralyzed and incapable — if we lose or have to do without our cell phones. Think about the time you were on a road trip, went on vacation in a more rural area, or went to visit others and your cell phone did not have a good signal, or perhaps none at all. You know that feeling that happened, right? In the pit of your stomach. A kind of mild or moderate panic, if not more. See my point?
- Phones and their apps seem to be a siren's call for our attention. If we feel the least bit bored, we reach for our cell phone. If we are watching a movie, we are often on our cell phone. Walking outside, on campus, or on our way to work — you got it: on the cell phone.
What's left for everything else?
See where this is going? If our attention is so possessed by the cell phone and its apps, what is left for everything else: work, conversations, deep thinking, relaxation, meditation, exercise, homework, creativity, or even engaging in the arts? These are the things that, at one time or another, have been deeply valued by almost any culture. These things that we know to be good, needed, enriching, edifying — that can bring peace and joy — have over the past few decades been eroded by less and less attention directed to them, at least meaningful sustained attention.
Want more? Follow my additional blogs to come to see how this leads into the crisis I referred to earlier.