Wednesday, September 13, 2017 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, September 13, 2017 // The Statement 
5B

Lessons in Silence

Navigating our digital world

b y R e b e c c a Ta r n o p o l, Editorial Page Editor
S

ome dreary November day my 

junior year of high school, I 

plugged away at a calculus test. 

As I calculated how quickly the 

height of water was changing in a tank drain-

ing at some fixed rate, I felt it emanating from 

my right pocket. Buzz. I knew exactly what it 

was: a group chat of my friends who attended 

another high school, texting over their lunch 

hour. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence — 

my phone often blew up during this class, text 

after text, notification after notification.

But this time its incessant buzzing was cer-

tainly audible in the silent test room. When 

I turned in the test, a mixture of embarrass-

ment and indignation prompted me to set my 

phone on silent. It has remained on silent ever 

since.

***

I got my first smartphone — an iPhone 

5S — in 2013. I was 16 years old. Even then, 

I entered the smartphone world late. In 2012, 

the average age children got their first smart-

phone was 12. By 2016, this age lowered to 10.

Nonetheless, I now stand among the major-

ity of American adults who own smartphones. 

According to a 2016 Pew Research Center 

survey, 77 percent of U.S. adults own smart-

phones, compared to 43 percent in September 

2012. This skyrocketing trend suggests these 

numbers will only increase, especially as 

younger generations enter adulthood: 99 per-

cent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the U.S. owned 

smartphones as of 2016.

The ubiquity of smartphones and social 

media usage — particularly among young peo-

ple — has prompted criticism from research-

ers and writers alike. But the statistics show 

smartphones are here to stay, at least until 

the next thing comes to replace them. Perhaps 

instead of lamenting the damage, we should 

examine how exactly smartphones change 

our interactions with the world around us.

***

When I left for the New England Literature 

Program this spring, the concept of living 

without electronics was not novel to me. From 

the age of ten, I was lucky enough to attend 

overnight summer camps with strict “no cell-

phone” policies. I regard these summers as 

formative to the person I am today, largely 

due to the community created in an environ-

ment free of digital distractions.

It was this community-driven environment 

that initially attracted me to NELP, a Univer-

sity of Michigan program in which students 

spend six weeks in rural New Hampshire 

reading the works of New England authors, 

writing voraciously in journals and explor-

ing the New England landscape — all without 

technology.

But NELP marked the first time in four 

years I had been device-less (staff at my sum-

mer camp had the “privilege” of bringing 

their phones to use on off hours), and perhaps 

the first time in my academic career I had an 

entirely analog educational experience (bar-

ring the Play-Doh and spaghetti paint half-

days of preschool).

In the days leading up to NELP, I worried 

about the severance from my primary mecha-

nism of communication. What will my friends 

be talking about without me? What if someone 

important emails me about an opportunity I’d 

regret to miss? What memes would crop up 

while I was gone?

Don’t get me wrong: Even in my phone’s 

silence, it commands my attention. My edit-

ing job at the Daily often demands I attend to 

texts and emails quickly, and course sites like 

Canvas allow instructors to update assign-

ments at any hour of the day, beckoning an 

obsessive student like myself to check in as 

often as possible.

Yet I’d be lying if I said I only obsessively 

checked my phone for business. I often receive 

compliments for my Facebook presence, and 

any of my friends can tell you I respond to texts 

and Snapchats at a record pace — for the most 

part (sorry, Mom). My arrival at NELP killed 

many long-standing Snapstreaks, the longest 

of which lasted 397 days before I turned in my 

phone for the spring (sorry, Jess).

The initial unease of turning in my phone at 

the beginning of NELP wasn’t enough to make 

me realize my dependency on it. Within hours 

I had forgotten about my phone, and I never 

once wished I had it. It wasn’t until weeks into 

the program, when I subconsciously reached 

for my phone in my pocket, feeling for its 

weight as if it were some ghost limb, that it 

hit me how ingrained in my life my phone had 

become.

***

“When I meet new people and they hear 

about my job, often their first question is 

something like: ‘Whoa, how do you deal with 

taking phones away from your students? That 

must be really hard,’” Aric Knuth, director 

of NELP, said. “But the fact is, it’s not hard. 

I think today people … are excited to see 

what life looks like and feels like without the 

phone.”

Sun poured into Aric’s office the September 

morning I visited him. He attended NELP as 

a student in 1997, years before smartphones 

made their debut, and has taught at the pro-

gram ever since. Even those not familiar with 

him can gather that NELP is core to his identi-

ty. His office door is plastered with remnants 

of NELPs past: flyers for mass meetings and 

reunions, notes from former students, a litho-

graph of Henry David Thoreau. Now, he sits 

in front of me, bespectacled and eager to talk.

“Things don’t feel that different to me, 

which is a strange thing to say because the 

world has changed so much,” Aric said. “But 

the fact is, in 1997 and ’98 and ’99 — when I 

was at NELP before phones — NELP was 

phoneless. And now, NELP is still phoneless.”

He attributes NELP’s unchanged atmo-

sphere to the fact that once students turn in 

their phones, they don’t lament their absence. 

Rather, it seems they merely forget about 

them, clicking into the lifestyle the program 

facilitates without much trouble. The story 

seems to turn after students receive their 

phones at the end of the program.

“Before smartphones, it was not uncom-

mon for a NELP student to get their cellphone 

back and smash it with a rock. I saw that a 

few times,” Aric said. “But if you’re smashing 

your iPhone with a rock, you’re losing a lot of 

money,” he added, contemplating the implica-

tions of society’s current investment in tech-

nology.

“When I say ‘invest,’ I mean that word in 

all the ways you might mean that word. It’s a 

financial investment, but your life is invested 

in it in all these ways too.”

***

“Investment” is a rather apt way to describe 

the relationship between humans and smart-

phones. Global revenue from smartphones 

sales reached $435.1 billion in 2016. Despite 

the iPhone X’s sticker price of $999, sales are 

still projected to break records. 

Where there is an investment in money, 

there also is an investment in time. Look 

around any room, and you’re likely to see blue 

light illuminating someone’s face. On campus, 

I see students text and Snapchat as they wait 

for class to start, particularly in large lecture 

courses. People text away during class, during 

passing times, during meals. I rarely take an 

elevator ride where at least one person isn’t 

avoiding conversation by scrolling through 

Facebook or Instagram on their phone. I 

myself am guilty of using my phone in all of 

these situations.

Research corroborates the large time 

investment I observed. In a 2017 ReportLinker 

survey, 46 percent of respondents reported 

checking their phone first thing when they 

wake up in the morning and 53 percent reported 

checking their phone before going to bed. Peo-

ple continue to check their phones constantly 

throughout the day. A 2015 Gallup poll report-

ed more than half of U.S. smartphone owners 

check their phones at least once an hour, with 11 

percent of respondents reporting checking their 

phones every few minutes. This amounts to U.S. 

consumers using their phones for an average of 

five hours over the course of a day.

Another 2015 Gallup poll revealed nearly half 

of U.S. smartphone owners could not imagine 

their lives without smartphones, a phenomenon 

they call “smartphone amnesia.” In practice, 

smartphone amnesia is likely more common, as 

a smartphone’s convenience often hides itself 

subtly in our daily lives. Last week in my medi-

eval travel literature course, my professor posed 

the question: “What do you use when you trav-

el?” The immediate answers were dominated by 

digital tools: smartphones, Google Maps, apps 

like GroupOn and Uber.

I couldn’t help but think about how just 

four months before my friends and I had been 

dropped off at a random location in rural New 

Hampshire, given a map and a compass and 

were told to get back to camp by dinner time. 

How foreign this analog way of travel had 

become.

***

Back in Aric’s office, he professed his fasci-

nation with the ways technology interacts with 

our daily lives.

“I do think often about how these technolo-

gies totally shape our vision of the world, in 

ways that isn’t (sic) always cool,” Aric contin-

ued. “The social media stuff, the Facebook algo-

rithm that determines what you see. … The fact 

that there’s just a thousand people in the world, 

and my sense of the community I’m a part of is 

really shaped by this algorithm.”

Facebook’s algorithms have grown notorious 

for their ability to tailor content specifically to 

each of its users’ tastes. These algorithms have 

proven to be incredibly powerful at shaping 

our perceptions. In 2012, Facebook conducted 

a behavioral experiment wherein algorithms 

curated people’s newsfeeds to selectively 

include either uplifting or upsetting content, 

and researchers found users’ moods shifted 

accordingly.

As he wrapped up a story about an incon-

sistency in Apple Maps that left him lost in the 

woods a few weeks earlier, Aric provided a note 

of caution. “There’s that danger of relying so 

much on the technology and the way it repre-

sents and can misrepresent the world.”

***

Misrepresentation is certainly a problem on 

social media, whose platforms host content that 

is highly curated both by the people posting it 

and by the algorithms calculating what exactly 

each user wants to see.

Considering the amount of time people 

spend on social media, this misrepresentation 

becomes especially problematic. A 2016 Nielsen 

report revealed that U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 

spend an average of six hours and 19 minutes on 

social media per week; U.S. adults ages 35 to 49 

spend even more — six hours and 58 minutes per 

week. This means that U.S. adults spend signifi-

cant amounts of time pouring over the carefully 

curated highlight reels of other people’s lives.

It’s no surprise, then, that research has 

revealed overwhelmingly negative correlations 

between social media usage and mental well-

being. A 2013 study conducted by psychology 

researchers at the University found that Face-

book usage correlated with a decline in “subjec-

tive well-being” of young adults. Studies have 

also cited Instagram as a particularly odious 

platform for mental well-being.

These effects are particularly troubling for 

a demographic Jean Twenge, professor of psy-

chology at San Diego State University, coined 

as the “iGen.” She defines the “iGen” as people 

born between 1995 and 2012, whose childhoods 

were dominated by the internet and rise of 

smartphones. By these standards, most Univer-

sity undergraduates are members of the “iGen.”

Twenge found higher rates of loneliness, 

sleep deprivation, depression and suicide among 

“iGen” teens in the years since smartphones 

became household items. Twenge fears these 

ailments will devastate a generation, as these 

problems will likely linger into adulthood.

***

Week five, day six of NELP, I sat on a dock 

with my friend Kelly, watching the still waters 

of Lake Winnipesaukee. With the end of the pro-

gram growing palpably near, we griped about 

how our phones would soon bombard us with 

information. I dreaded sifting through the hun-

dreds of texts and emails that would populate 

my phone as it woke from its six-week slumber.

I remember feeling this incredible sadness 

that NELP inevitably had to end, and I’d have 

to return to this sea of endless information. 

My time at NELP had left me content — if not 

happy — for the longest duration than I had 

been perhaps since my last phoneless days at 

camp in 2013. I woke up excited to see what each 

day would bring. I did not need worry about 

some exam, some meeting, some post-gradu-

ate opportunity lingering in the distant future 

often made urgent by the constant pestering of 

a smartphone.

But to attribute the happiness I felt at NELP 

solely to my separation from technology would 

be inaccurate. There were other factors, too: the 

rigorous yet supportive academic environment, 

the regular hiking trips through the New England 

wilderness, the opportunity to witness the bloom-

ing of spring for the second time in a year, the two 

dogs who laid patiently on the porch daily.

If anything, NELP offered a sense of clarity I 

hadn’t experienced in a long time. All that mattered 

in the world for those six weeks was right in front 

of me. I could sit on the dock staring out onto Win-

nipesaukee, basking in the present, asking myself, 

to borrow words from Kurt Vonnegut: “how wide it 

was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

***

At NELP, we weren’t at all strangers to the ideas 

of technological detractors. Hell, I even took a class 

about the Unabomber, who was certainly no advo-

cate for technological advancement. Before even 

leaving for NELP, we were instructed to read the 

“Economy” chapter of “Walden.” There, among his 

criticisms of American capitalist culture, Thoreau 

also denounces advents in communication tech-

nologies.

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic 

telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and 

Texas, it may be, have nothing important to com-

municate,” Thoreau writes. “We are eager to tunnel 

under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some 

weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first 

news that will leak through into the broad, flapping 

American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has 

the whooping cough.”

In essence, Thoreau detests the construction of 

the telegraph because it creates noise that dimin-

ishes whatever utility the shiny new technology 

might have had to begin with. Still, the novelty of 

the invention draws people to it, despite its useless-

ness.

150 years later, Thoreau’s words still hold truth 

— perhaps more so now than ever before. Social 

media has granted us the opportunity to commu-

nicate (instantly) from Maine to Tehran, Iran, and 

Princess Adelaide’s affliction has been supplanted 

by clickbait imploring you to discover whatever 

shocking ensemble Kylie Jenner wore to dinner the 

other night.

There’s a sort of self-consciousness that sur-

rounds social media usage. I’m keen to believe 

many of us know we shouldn’t care about our 

middle school classmate’s trip to the Bahamas or 

what Kylie Jenner wore to dinner that night. But 

thousands of years of human social evolution didn’t 

hardwire us to resist our urges to return yet again 

to these platforms which radically change the 

way humans interact with each other. The iPhone 

itself is only 10 years old, and apps just nine. These 

are our modern day magnetic telegraphs, and we 

haven’t yet figured out how to filter out the noise.

***

When I returned to “real world” Ann Arbor 

for the summer, I found myself frustrated at how 

quickly I fell back into my old habits, spending 

empty hours leafing aimlessly through Facebook, 

Instagram and Twitter. I had gone six weeks with-

out social media and didn’t miss anything impor-

tant at all — why was it that I now felt as if I’d be 

missing out on something if I wasn’t always check-

ing my phone?

It took me a while to realize NELP was a fan-

tasy land: We were isolated unto ourselves, all 53 

of us operating on the same rigid daily schedule. If 

I wanted to hang out with someone, I only had to 

walk 500 feet to find them. And we were still able to 

get access to memes if we wanted them — we’d just 

have to wait for them to arrive in the mail.

The world as we know it doesn’t operate so neat-

ly. We live in large societies, populated by people 

living incredibly different lives on incredibly differ-

ent schedules. If I were to walk to a friend’s house 

unannounced, I’d be lucky if they actually hap-

pened to be there. As much as I didn’t like it, I came 

to realize my phone offered the most efficient way 

of controlling the entropy of everyday life, to coor-

dinate my life with those around me.

It was just that my next task had to be finding 

balance.

***

Where I find fault in much of the current dis-

course about smartphones and social media usage 

is its failure to treat what it means to be a human 

navigating a world that grows increasingly digital 

with adequate sensitivity. Too often smartphones 

are written off as entirely detrimental to our exis-

tence, when the inventions themselves are not 

inherently evil.

For example, in an op-ed for the New York 

Times, Cal Newport, associate professor of com-

puter science at Georgetown University, claims that 

using social media ravages our ability to do impor-

tant work. Surely, he argues, if we channeled the 

same energy into our work as we do into perfect-

ing our LinkedIn profiles or crafting our Instagram 

aesthetic, perhaps we would actually accomplish 

something of worth.

But claiming that social media is of no value to 

important work is just as egregious as claiming that 

it is harmless. I, for one, hope to become a research 

scientist and I think some of the most important 

work scientists do is share their research on social 

media. As is, the bulk of scientific knowledge is 

inaccessible to the general public, either from the 

thick jargon that litters scientific discourse or the 

steep subscription fees for scientific journals.

In our current cultural moment, the general 

public is much more apt to believe political pander-

ing than actual scientific data, an issue particularly 

relevant to climate change. For scientists to forgo 

the opportunity to reach millions of people on a 

platform they use by choice — for free, might I add 

— is irresponsible and possibly even destructive to 

scientific careers. After all, much basic research is 

funded by the general public’s tax dollars.

Beyond the professional world, social media 

has also served as a springboard for social change. 

Social media has given historically subjugated voic-

es a platform to come to the forefront of conversa-

tions and organize massive movements. (Though 

these platforms remain admittedly imperfect on 

these fronts.) Black Lives Matter, perhaps one of the 

largest social movements in recent history, started 

as a hashtag on Twitter. January’s Women’s March 

grew from a Facebook event into an international 

affair.

At the end of the day, smartphones and social 

media have made our worlds infinitely larger, and, 

by extension, have offered us more resources and 

opportunities than we have time to take up. Sure, 

there are completely inconsequential opportuni-

ties we often engage in — adding that stranger on 

LinkedIn or picking the right Instagram filter 

for that photo of your brunch. But if we use 

these technologies in a measured and mindful 

way, we can do some truly amazing work.

***

Here I am now, back in the noisy world of 

Canvas announcements, Daily emails and push 

notifications. It’s been a strange return to the 

traditional classroom, where the roundtables 

and notebooks that characterized my NELP 

education have been replaced by rows of desks 

and laptops. Other things have come more 

naturally: My Snapstreaks are slowly regaining 

traction, the longest of which now clocking in 

at a measly 79 days.

I have taken steps, though, to limit my phone 

usage, to try to re-establish that clarity I felt 

at NELP. I keep my phone tucked away in my 

backpack during class. I ride my bike around 

campus to keep from texting as I commute. 

I leave my phone to charge on my desk over-

night, far from arm’s reach. Of course, I keep 

my phone in the same state it has been in since 

2013: silent.

 
 
 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF REBECCA TARNOPOL

