Collin Willis

Imagine yourself, if you will, in the year 2011. Collin was fourteen years old, it was a Saturday. He had two things on his mind, video games and social media. On Saturdays the rules around how much TV you could watch were a little lax and Mom, Dad, siblings could often be found out of the house so there was nobody to fight for the remote or the shared laptop with. Collin, who didn’t yet have a smart phone and had only recently gotten texting, could really only communicate through Facebook messages. So the majority of many Saturdays were spent with Super Smash Bros Melee on the TV, and a laptop slowly reaching temperatures above 100* open on the couch next to him.

Now, let’s wind the clocks forward a decade or so. The TV is no longer shared, neither is the laptop. Collin does have a smart phone and texting. The technology has changed but the negative effects of it and the patterns it encourages have not. Instead of sitting on the couch with a laptop open, I lay on a bed with my phone there to connect me to even more things than fourteen year old Collin could have dreamed of.

As I’ve felt more anxious lately and as I have monitored these patterns within myself, I’ve come to a realization. This isn’t a realization I haven’t had before, nor is it a realization that people haven’t already had long before I did. This is not a new or even an original question, but it is an important one. Were we ever meant to be this connected?

2000s Kids

I’ve never not known a world without the internet. While it was much more rudimentary in the growing up years, as far back as I can remember there was at least one computer in the house running on Windows 98 and connected to the slowest internet connection you’ve ever seen. I grew up in the era of Massive Multiplayer Online Games. Whether it was ToonTown, Club Penguin, or Lego Universe; even before social media the internet was a constant social presence. I was in middle school when everyone began buying Xbox 360 WiFi adapters and jacking their red ringed 360’s into the LAN. I’ve had a cellphone since I was in the 5th grade and had a laptop or family PC with an internet connection as far back as I can remember. The internet and New Technology have always been a part of the social experience as I have known it.

This isn’t helped by the fact that I am what you might call “An Indoor Kid”. I was never very good at sports even when I tried. Going skating, surfing, or learning parkour were never activities I was drawn to except for the fact that my friends were drawn to them. Unfortunately this helped prime me for a digital social experience. Yes, I liked going to spend time with friends in real life, but these digital experiences opened up friendships that I wasn’t going to have the opportunity to foster through other hobbies or interests.

Retro

A world that doesn’t utilize any of these tools or technologies isn’t something that I have ever known or had to know. My friends were all connected with phones and social media before I was. The network was already in place, the patterns pre-determined before I ever had a device in my hands. So things that are not the norm of the totality of the human experience have felt like the norm for me and many others. It is not normal, for any generation prior to mine, to live in a world where everyone has constant access to you at all times. If someone wants your attention for whatever reason, they can directly buzz your pocket or your wrist in seconds. There is no middle-man, no curfew, no barrier to entry from the moment numbers are shared or profiles followed. More than just friends and family; businesses, media outlets, and strangers using dozens of platforms all have that same ability to instantly grab your attention and share whatever is on their mind with you.

On a daily basis we receive more information per hour than most prior generations have ever been able to even fathom. We are connected to birthdays, relationship statuses, dating pools, world events, family squabbles, news bulletins, and a million other distractions instantaneously. There is no cap to the number of things that can vie for our attention and if we are not careful there is no limit to the number of times they can take that attention from us every minute of every hour of every day.

Snap Back to Reality

In my parents day, say the late 70s for example. If your friend wanted to talk to you they first had to have your phone number or find it in the Yellow Pages. They’d then have to call the house, talk to whomever answered the phone first, and then wait for you to come to the phone and talk until someone else needed it on either end. If you happened to be out of the house when the phone rang, you wouldn’t even know they wanted your attention until you came back and they wouldn’t have any inkling of when you’d be able to give it let alone if they’d be able to give their attention at that time as well.

There was a disconnectedness to human communication that required patience and tempered expectation. There was no guarantee that the available means of communication were nearby the person who they belonged to. Wallet and Keys were the only two things you needed when you left the house. Now every single one of us has this magic device that doesn’t just take calls but also texts, and snapchats, and tiktoks, and DMs, etc… In most houses, nobody shares these devices or their many outlets. Everyone has their own phone with their own accounts and own contacts tucked into their pockets. The barriers to connection are virtually all demolished and we have all unintentionally given every person and corporate entity on this earth permission to get a direct hold of us at any given moment for any reason of their choosing. And when we use these devices to reach out to someone else and they don’t respond within an hour we wonder what horrible accident they must have gotten into.

Modern technology has created an inappropriate conception that communication must be instant and constant, and that we should share ourselves with anyone and everyone at all possible waking moments. These devices constantly beg for our attention, buzzing, beeping, and ringing at all hours to get us to stop being in the moment of what we are doing and to look down at those little screens. In short, we have all become accustomed to carrying these parasitic little demon boxes with us in everything we do.

Pay Attention to Me

I’ve wrestled a lot with the role that social media and the cellphone play in my social, familial, and romantic life. I talked in Anxiety Spike about the role that these things have played in my elevated levels of anxiety as of late. I’d like to dial in on those ideas a bit further and to talk about some strategies I’ve used to cope with and separate myself from this digital entrapment.

You don’t realize how much these things demand your attention until you suddenly can’t give it to them. The place this is most obvious for me is at the movies. My phone stays in my pocket once Nicole Kidman comes on screen and doesn’t come out again until the closing credits roll. It still manages to make its presence known, however, as it vibrates in my pocket and buzzes my watch. I’m so used to just turning the little demon over and seeing what it has to say the moment it clears its throat to speak that when I’m in that environment where that behavior is prohibited I feel it weighing on me. Like the One Ring it calls incessantly, urging me to give in and see what empty promises it has to offer.

One Ring to Bring Them All…

I became more aware of this draw the power the demon box held over me as I went without social media for a few weeks. There was a silence to daily life that hadn’t been there for a long time. Yes, there will still occasional buzzes from the apps left on the phone, but my phone was quieter than it had ever been before. I’m back on social media now and I find myself constantly having to fight the impulse to spend every quiet moment using the demon box to fill the silence. So I started doing something I’ve never done before, turning it off.

It started as a test one day while I was watching a movie at home. Two hours, no phone on or anywhere near me. I kept wanting to reach over and grab it anytime the movie slowed down or I got up to do something else, but it was powered off. The ability to instantly get the “socialization” I wanted was paused. I was disconnected in a way that I had not been before. I felt less anxious, I didn’t feel the constant need to instantly respond to everyone and see literally everything that everyone had going on over social media. I felt good and it felt weird because I hadn’t intentionally experienced a world that quiet and that unplugged in over a decade.

So I started trying to put that practice into other parts of daily life. If I felt myself getting overly anxious about something, if I had a project or task I wanted to really focus on, if I was just overwhelmed I started shutting it off. I wasn’t drowning in the ocean or a pool I didn’t fill up, I was drowning in a bath that I had drawn. I was so fixated on the water that it had never occurred to me to just open up the drain and turn off the tap.

…And in the Darkness Bind Them

I’m ashamed to admit how difficult it is to detach from this device that’s meant to basically be a part of us and our social experience. I am both a people pleaser and a person who feeds off of that sense of connection, so I will reply the literal millisecond I see a message. I don’t think that part of me is ever going to change, but I can change how often I check and am exposed to those messages and those platforms. For better or worse, phones are a necessary part of so many aspects of our lives.

Until the apocalypse wipes us out and the Apes take over, phones are likely going to continue to be such a constant presence in our lives. I cannot do anything to change that, but I can take the time to reflect on what that means. We were not meant to be accessible and on at all times. We weren’t meant to have this much noise and distraction in our lives. We weren’t meant to be bound to the digital world and virtual experiences in the middle of every real thing that life has to offer us. So I’m making an effort to find a balance between the two. To answer the question I asked in the opener, no we weren’t meant to be this connected but unfortunately we are. I can’t disconnect all the time ever, but I can prioritize taking time and space not just to be present with myself but with others, with my hobbies, and with the world around me. It’s time to turn that little demon box off.