Here is a thing I actually did: In the picture above you see a chair and a window. I was sitting in the chair, having a cup of tea, and checking some important notification on my phone. (Or I was still trying to figure out TikTok—coulda been either.) Anyway, I thought I heard Angelo pull up in the driveway, the location of which is indicated by the white car you can spot through the window. So I checked my WEBCAM app to see if it was him arriving back home. (It wasn’t, it was the mailman, so I had to get up anyway . . . )
I mean . . . how lazy is that? And how dependent are we (me) on our devices?
At a conference in October, one of the presenters said she had left her phone at home and had to get used to not having it with her. We were in Dayton, Ohio and she had traveled from Houston. Texas. Not down the street or across town—she left her phone halfway across the country. I’ve rarely left mine in the next room for any length of time.
We are bewitched, aren’t we? (Me.) As much as I like to think I’m not—I am. I don’t even walk out the kitchen door to check how cold it is outside even though we still have one of those plastic thingys with the numbers and lines and the red stuff inside attached to the porch. Oh, thermometer…that’s what it is. I look at the weather app on my phone.
I’ll admit I’m slightly bothered by our reliance on all these devices. (My.) On one hand, in the early part of my educational career, my job was to help teachers integrate technology into their practice. I promoted going to where the students were--online. But that kind of teaching wasn’t embraced by but a few. (Personally, I feel like if there had been a bigger push to integrate technology into curriculum we wouldn’t have been so screwed when we had to go virtual during the pandemic, but that’s just me.)
It’s the notifications that bother me, as in I am one of those people who have to clear ALL of them from my phone all the time. When I see someone’s phone that has little red circles all over the screen with very large numbers, I nearly pass out. How do they DO that? Let all those notifications just SIT there…mocking them? I have to rid myself of those little annoyances promptly—if I can. Sometimes they’re sneaky and they’re layers deep and when you think you’ve cleared it and go back to your home screen—they’re still there! Bastards.
Which I guess is also bewildering. Why do I care whether or not there are zero or a thousand little red dots all over the face of my phone? (Because it’s unnatural, that’s why.) I read a recent New York Times article about this and apparently our (my) ability to focus on a task has dropped from minutes to seconds over the last 15 or so years. These devices that are supposed to save time and streamline tasks end up being a huge time suck and attention-span destroyer. One of the experts from the article also suggested that “these urges to self-distract are caused by stress.” I can certainly vouch for that—when I need a minute from some of the stressful situations that have been dogging me for the last too-many years, I grab my phone and play Gummy Drop. Or—and this must happen to you--you’re just going to check to see if that email came in about the grapefruit you ordered or look up that restaurant that you saw a friend post about on Facebook and suddenly, it’s an hour (2 hours?) later and you don’t even know if the grapefruit has shipped. I know it happens to me. A lot. The Times article suggested a few ways to wrangle back your attention span through some exercises. Like taking “tech breaks” where you set a timer for increasing amounts of time before you interrupt a task to check your Instagram or Twitter feed. Other tips are to analyze your use and practice reading books again. (It’s all here.)
Whatever the lure of my phone is for me—a stress reliever, a distraction or a habit, I could probably go without it for longer periods of time. When I’m writing, I don’t always have my phone by my side. (No, that’s not true…it’s right there. But as a phone, not a device. There’s a difference. I swear!) I could leave it affixed to my desk as if it were an actual telephone and get up and walk away from it when I’m done for the day. And if I wanted to see who pulled into the driveway or whether or not it was raining? I could always get up and look out the window.
Your phone dependence is so relatable and so much more entertaining than my own. I nodded and smirked at your recount, while cringing at my own.
Distract by reading the latest from you❤️