I have posted on such matters before, but it’s been a while, and I just came across this article by a man who gave up his smartphone.

I wonder what you all make of it.

(Posted from an iPhone while waiting in my car somewhere.)

TL:DR

There’s two issues here isn’t there.

The first is that he was obsessed with it, which is a failing of him rather than the technology.

The second that he’s rather enjoying being a Luddite and having to use things like maps, which is an argument you could apply to any technology. After giving up my car, I had to use public transport!

But, I’ll let you into a little secret.

Sometimes, when my phone rings, I ignore it. I carry a phone for my benefit not everyone else’s.

If you can master that trick, everything else falls into place. Sure, it’s nice to follow signposts and work out navigation, I’m all for that. But when I’m sprinting across an unfamiliar town and my train leaves in six minutes then damn right I’m going to have Google Maps open.

This reads like smug virtue signalling.

Instead, I kept looking and made mental notes to describe these places later, you know, with this stuff: words, words, words. Reader, it was worth it, it has been worth it, it is worth it, going dumb. I’m not going back.

So now one form of art and communcation is inherently superior to another, is it? Photography is a powerful medium – it makes no difference if the camera in question is attached to a phone or not.

The more telling and common response I’ve been getting, however, is one of sighs and knowing nods and highly selective envy. A lot of people wish they could give up their smartphones, or at least use them less, or use them better, and anyway really, really like to talk about wanting to change their relationships to their phones.

Well that reinforces my initial impression.

I was one of these people until earlier this year, when I realized I had to do something else. I was at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra with my oldest daughter, who’s 13. She’d bought us tickets to the TSO’s screening of Casablanca, accompanied by a live performance of the score. We’d dressed up and gone downtown and just before the show started, she said, “What are you doing?” I looked up from my phone, a little glazed and confused. “What? Oh. I’m just taking a note, um, for my novel.”

If he’s bought tickets to a show and then ignored it in favour of something else, that’s his fault, it’s got nothing to do with phones.

I noticed and remembered things about the people around me – about them, not about me noticing them and communicating to others elsewhere about me noticing them and then waiting, staring down in my lap, to see what others thought of me and my noticing.

I think he needs to adjust his relationship with himself and the world; simply replacing his phone isn’t going to do that. I guarantee he’ll be back on his phone within 18 months otherwise.