take a break
Ah, our lovely holiday season: wild & windy in the West Country, shivering in sleety Scotland, tanning in Tuscany or hitting the sangria in Espana. Usually, at least. Apparently, the talk amongst the chattering classes these days is as much about the ubiquitous unplugging, aka ‘digital detox’, as it is about where they’re off to and what they’ll be getting up to. It’ll come as no surprise that this doesn’t matter a great deal to me as I didn’t even take a phone this year but my escapades did provide the opportunity of observing my fellow travellers, and their digital habits, at very close quarters. A veritable Desmond Morris for the digital age I hear you say.
Firstly, the ages of me and my fellow holiday makers are 26, 48, 55 and 64 and the weapons of choice included two fully-loaded iPhone 6S’s and an Android Samsung Galaxy. Nice kit, allegedly. Ofcom reported last week that the average Briton checks their smartphone every twelve minutes, which be default means plenty are checking it more often than that. Furthermore, that average Brit is spending exactly 24 hours online & connected each week, with many (25% of us) clocking-up in excess of 40 hours. From my own home-grown analysis I can confirm one of us is less, two of us are about average and one is the excessive user. And the latter is the elder, a modern-day silver surfer!
For most then it would appear that a dose of ‘digital wellness’ is just what the doctor would order. And who do you think are the first to cotton on to this? Yep, Big Tech. ‘Forest’ is an app where a tree is automatically displayed when you put the device down, and it grows bigger and more lush the longer you leave it alone. Pick it up and, hey presto, it withers and dies. Another, ‘Wind Down’ slows fades to black & white the longer you leave it untouched and Apple recently announced a whole slew of features that are designed to limit your use.
Now, I don’t think for one second that either the irony or the conflict of interest is lost on any of us: In an obvious case of ‘turkeys voting for Christmas’ these apps and techniques aim to diminish our dependency by increasing our dependency on the device to decrease our dependency… and so it goes round. Outsourcing our self-discipline in such a manner can only, in the long-term, weaken our resolve. We don’t need a dying tree we just need a backbone.
So, having claimed the moral high ground I’m now going to admit to being a complete fraud and downright hypocrite. All my smartphone cycling pals have the app Strava, and heart-rate monitors and distance calculators and I rib them mercilessly for being a slave to them all. But when we stop for a coffee, who wants to know how far we’ve gone, at what pace, how much elevation did we climb and who got their heart beat above 180bpm? Why, me of course. When my maps fail me who’s the first to demand a satnav determined alternate course? The nearest campsite and a Googled-answer to the pub quiz question from earlier in the evening? Yep, you got it. I don’t need a smartphone as I have access to yours.
And wrt to an individual’s backbone let’s not forget that the little dopamine ping of addiction is built into these devices from the get-go, with constant reaffirmation and engagement being the key to continued use. Philosophically, we need to hold the corporations to account, not the users. The best way to experience a successful ‘conscious uncoupling’ is surely to be doing something way more entertaining, more fun and more compelling than scrolling your life away. Think of the people you’ve missed smiling at with your head permanently bowed, the books you could’ve read, the vistas you whould’ve seen, the conversations you should’ve enjoyed. That is, unless you’re out with a boring b*gger like me who needs you to be on your phone!
