Few hand-held objects can compete with the allure of the smartphone. Has there been a more enticing hand-toy in the history of the planet? The greenest, most gleaming emerald in the world wouldn’t hold anyone’s attention for more than a minute or two these days, and a compact mirror will eventually bore even the vainest among us. Smartphones, on the other hand, we see every day, and we never tire of looking at them. We marvel at the beauty of smartphones.
But the real story of smartphones, and what gives us our insatiable appetite for them, is less about their visual beauty and more about how that visual beauty seduces us into pressing and sliding our fingers against them. Smartphones invite us to manipulate them. And it’s hard to turn down their invitation. Standing in line or stopped at a red light, we reach for them like a smoker reaches for a pack of cigarettes. When the airplane has landed, and we’re allowed to use our electronic devices again, we can’t wait to use them again. We’ve developed a smartphone habit.
We hold our smartphones close to our bodies -- in a pocket, in a purse, in a hand -- and the noises they produce grab our attention, reminding us of our connection to them. We know how to reach them quickly when we hear them ring, like a mother soothing her baby's crying. This physical intimacy with our smartphones reflects a psychological intimacy. They’re wirelessly a part of us.
It starts with an itch we feel in our fingers, an itch to pick up a smartphone and probe it. Our fingers and our hands feel a kind of yearning to reunite with the seductive surface of the smartphone over and over and over. The itch can be prompted by the mere sight of the smartphone, like the sight of a sunflower seed can cue a bluejay to swoop down and peck at it. For example, the first thing I do when I step out of bed each morning is remove my smartphone from its charging cradle and start pressing its buttons, pecking at the cherry-red balloons that have popped up over night. Or the itch can be prompted by brief hiccups in the rhythms of our daily routines, for example, when the flow of our busy day is altered by being forced to wait in line. We live our lives with an increasingly frantic sense of forward momentum, never letting a few seconds go by without feeling like we have to do something or press something, and the smartphone, being always close to us, always handy, lures our itchy fingers toward it. They follow us around, tempting our fingers, even when we’re sitting on the toilet.
Retailers know that when we’re standing in line waiting, we’re not going to transition briefly into a chilled out mode and just take the moment to relax, so they place candy racks in the checkout lanes and wait for our minds -- and our fingers -- to start probing the conveniently displayed impulse purchases. A smartphone is a modern day candy rack we carry around with us all the time, clamoring for our attention whenever we’re made to wait in line or pause for a few seconds at a stoplight. Increasingly, we’re seduced. Some of us are so seduced that even activities requiring our undivided attention -- driving a car, avoiding open manholes -- often take a backseat to smartphoning. People, if you han't noticed, drive around pressing and probing their smartphones, paying attention to the small screen in their hand instead of the large screen at the front of their car. It’s like we’re addicted to them. This modern habit of ours, the smartphone habit, this is the true revolution.
Designed to fit in the palm of a hand, and manufactured to be crisply visible when held at a comfortable arm’s length, a smartphone is connected to a user’s body by a living bridge of flesh, a half-extended arm. Held to face the user, the smartphone presents a surface to the user’s eyes and fingers, an illuminated doing-space. Fingers steer the smartphone to show the eyes a series of vistas, and the user’s button-pressing is rewarded with the appearance of some novelty.
In this space the smartphone defines, we do a variety of things. A 2012 survey by O2 NewsCentre (1) suggests that for the newly-networked generation of users, phone calls are actually the fifth most popular activity smartphones are used to perform. They surf the web, text, network, and listen to music more frequently than they make phone calls, and they spend a lot of their day doing it. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported recently (2) that young people spend more time smartphoning than they do watching television sets or reading books. It’s a very popular habit.
The case may be made that it’s a stressful habit. “The computer is electronic cocaine for many people,” says Dr. Peter Wybroth, a psychiatrist and endocrinologist and director of UCLA’s Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior (3). “Our brains are wired for finding immediate reward. With technology, novelty is the reward. You essentially become addicted to novelty.”
A smartphone is the opposite of a bubble bath, if you think about it. Whereas a bubble bath invites you to sink into it and relax, a smartphone pulls your posture forward into a tense, cramped hunch over it. Whereas a bubble bath quiets you, a smartphone makes you move, pulling your mind and your fingers forward with a series of promises and the near-instantaneous fulfillment of those promises. With a smartphone, we can’t wait to see what window will open next. They take us elsewhere and elsewhere and elsewhere. With a bubble bath, you settle down where you are.
This stress-promoting quality of the smartphone dawned on me while waiting in line for coffee one afternoon. Instead of just letting my mind rest for a second, I pulled out my smartphone and clicked the capital H to check the Huffington Post. I’d already checked it earlier that day, twice as a matter of fact, and I’d already read the articles I was genuinely interested in reading, so I scrolled down to the, shall we say, less notable and newsworthy items, and clicked on an article whose headline I couldn’t resist: “Jennifer Aniston Put on Baby Food Diet” (4). In other words, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Faced with two choices -- spend one minute standing peacefully in line or spend one minute pressing a small computer for news of Jennifer Aniston’s supposed eating habits -- sad to say, I chose the baby food diet. Waiting impatiently for the article to load, my eyes darted nervously across the screen. Then the ludicrousness of it all washed over me. Smartphones lead us down some pretty pointless rabbit holes. I mean, Jennifer Aniston isn’t even much of a celebrity anymore. And if she were, why would I care what she’s eating? Electronic cocaine, that’s why.
Walk into any school library today, or any coffee shop, and you'll find a glowing smartphone next to every open textbook. People half-studying French, half-smartphoning. In most restaurants and gyms you'll find large television monitors displaying news or entertainment programs. Once I wandered into an unused terminal at an airport and found it completely empty of people, and silent but for the sound of CNN playing loudly to no one. There’s a new normal now. We live in a sea of stimulation, a kind of baseline mental fog we fail to really notice anymore -- smartphones burping and beeping all around us, televisions on our gas pumps and on our shopping carts, advertisement banners crowding our computer screens, ring tones everywhere.
This technologically infused living space is the default mode of existence for many, if not most, of us today. Smartphones live in our pockets, in our purses, in our hands, always very close to us, so intimately related to us, one could argue, they’re literally extensions of our bodies, wirelessly connected extensions of ourselves. When we lose them, it feels like a part of us has been amputated.
Even if we wanted to put some distance between ourselves and our smartphones in order to limit the stress they promote, we wouldn’t be able to avoid them. They’re already too engrained, too embedded in our lives. We’re too far under their spell. If we want to limit our use of smartphones, we’re going to have to use smartphones to accomplish this. This is the logic behind the Peaceful Habits app. It uses the smartphone habit you already carry in your pocket to point you in a more peaceful direction. It hijacks Jennifer Aniston to kiss her goodbye.
REFERENCES
1. “Making calls has become fifth most frequent use for a Smartphone for newly-networked generation of users.”
1. “Making calls has become fifth most frequent use for a Smartphone for newly-networked generation of users.”
O2 News Centre
June 29, 2012
2. Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds
The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation
January 20, 2010
3. “Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We’re Addicted to Stress”
Pacific Standard
June 19th, 2012
4. "Jennifer Aniston Put on Baby Food Diet by Tracy Anderson"
Huffington Post
May 5, 2012
love the piece
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