What Would You Do Without Your Phone?

I’m wrapping up this series by sharing two final reasons I’ve left (mostly left…)[1] social media. The first one is that social media, from my experience and from what I’ve observed, hinders us from learning and remembering useful skills and important information.

For example, do you remember your childhood best friend’s home phone number? I can. I can also remember those of several other classmates from elementary and middle school. I still know several of their birthdays too, even though it’s been 25 years, give or take, since I’ve celebrated a birthday with them at Chuck E. Cheese, the bowling alley, or, even better, the skating rink!

Granted, children’s brains are veritable sponges when it comes to memorizing and retaining facts, but I think an additional reason all those digits, useless as they are to me now, are inextricably ingrained in my noggin is because I didn’t have the Internet, much less a smartphone, with which to look them up. There were phone books and school directories, yes, but it was much more convenient to memorize, and it felt natural to do so. And things I couldn’t readily commit to memory, I wrote down, an act that also facilitates memorization and the processing of information.[2]

Another example that comes to mind is directions. From an early age, I knew exactly how to get from my house to a number of places around town: my school, my church, the barn where I took riding lessons, the gym where I took gymnastics lessons, my best friends’ houses, the tennis courts where my dad and I played… I’ve lived in San Antonio for nearly a decade and I still rely on my phone to get me any place that isn’t within a five-mile radius of my house (save La Cantera mall, wink wink…). Why? Because of my handy-dandy smartphone, of course! I just type in the name of my destination and, like magic, it tells me how to get there. I don’t have to pay much attention at all to how I get there; I simply follow directions and keep my eyes on the road while the memory-making parts of my brain kick back and relax.

According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, "The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought."

Even a single session of Internet usage can make it more difficult to file away information in your memory, says Erik Fransén, computer science professor at Sweden's KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Additionally, research has found that when we know a digital device will store information for us, we’re less likely to remember it ourselves. When we miss an appointment, for example, we often attribute it to scheduling it incorrectly in our phone’s calendar app, or to forgetting to set an alert reminding us of it. When we’re late for an event, it’s often because our directions app, on which we were depending to get us from point A to point B, failed us. And even if we YouTube how to do X, Y, or Z activity a dozen times, chances are good we’ll never quite remember the steps because we’ve outsourced that memory-storage space to YouTube.

And this leads me to a separate, yet not altogether unrelated concern, and that is that social media not only renders obsolete our need to commit things to memory, but also our need, one I believe is God-given, to meet with friends in person, face to face and/or voice to voice.

I have a very real concern for the younger generations who, it seems, have spent more time throughout their short lives looking down at their phones, iPads, and video game consoles than into people’s eyes. Is it just me, or do many of today’s adolescents seem shyer, less confident, and more anxious in social settings? I asked a teenager how he was doing the other day and, to my surprise, he gave me a stunned look that made me wonder if he’d misheard my “How are you doing?” as “I hate you with the fire of a thousand suns.”

According to clinical psychologist Dr. Alexandra Hamlet, “if you’re spending a lot of time on your phone, you have less time for activities that can build confidence, a sense of achievement and connectedness.”

Kids, and adults, for that matter, are wondrously-built machines, designed to do – to try and fail and figure things out. Our mental, emotional, and physical health flourish when we put our God-given skills and talents to the test by engaging with others and the world around us. Conversely, our health suffers when we shut off our brains and hearts in favor of online substitutes for joy-giving things like going for leisurely walks, reading under a shade tree, playing sports and backyard games, visiting new places, learning new hobbies, conversing with our voices instead of our fingers, hugging and high-fiving with our arms and hands instead of emoticons…and the list goes on.

This past February, millions of Texans got a brief taste of living off-grid when severe winter storms rolled through. I didn’t intend to wade into doomsday waters here, but let’s just say something happens, be it an Cyber/EMP attack or another weather-related crisis, that leaves us without power, which means no running water, no banks, no Target runs, no transport networks, and perhaps most disconcerting to some, no communications, which means no Facebook, TikTok, or texting! In the blink of an eye, we could be catapulted into a Little House on the Prairie way of living. I wonder...how many of us would experience withdrawal symptoms upon losing the appendage that is our smartphones, and the “social” networks that were never that social after all?

social: of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society[3]

I’m saddened when I consider that it might take a catastrophe, by which we are forced to disconnect from technology and reconnect with nature and the lives of those around us, to make us see and appreciate the real world in real time. Why don’t we prepare for such a scenario now by drastically reducing our screen time and returning to our roots as a species? Who knows, we might just find ourselves happier, and more at peace, than ever.

 “Communication is merely an exchange of information, but connection is an exchange of our humanity.” -Sean Stephenson

[1] As I mentioned last week, I still visit a select few Instagram accounts, and even so, I find myself getting distracted and hopping down rabbit trails. My goal for this week is track down these account users’ websites and/or Telegram/YouTube channels, which help me stay on task!

[2] https://www.gr8ness.com/writing-things-down-is-powerful/

[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/social