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