What We Lose from What We Gain
Can we draw a line in the sand on our phone use? Misgivings about how our children relate to phones and social media are one of the most bipartisan issues in our world today. One need only to know that our comatose Congress is contemplating action on the issue to understand how bipartisan the issue is. We disagree across party lines about almost anything, but the consensus on the toll that cell phone use is taking on young people borders on unanimity.
I think the reason the focus is on phone use by young people is largely because we can’t comfortably look at the problems that cell phone are doing to people in every age group. It is too paternal and too close to home. I have friends and coworkers who claim they hate social media and phones but still unapologetically glue their eyes to them at gatherings with real, live, actual, human beings. I’m better than that, but not my much! I try to wall off social media and only use it in ways that are beneficial to my career or spreading the word on issues I care about and I fail. I fail because it’s enjoyable and it’s helpful. But I have always had access to enjoyable and helpful things. What I miss now is my brain involuntarily resting in the middle of the day because I have hit an unavoidable pocket of boredom. What I miss is the repetitive, familiar joy of re-reading the ingredients to Pert Plus while working out a number two if I forgot to bring a book. What I miss is willing a happy hour into a rewarding, long-ass conversation with no one opting out to retreat into their phones. But I don’t miss it enough to not scan instagram on the shitter. I need higher powers to draw a line in the sand and start to create a stigma around cell phone use. That stigma won’t be quite the same as being in the stocks in colonial Williamsburg. But what if the stigma started to turn cell phone use during a hang into something akin to lighting a cigarette at a restaurant in the early 2000s; legally possible but socially (and literally) cancerous. I spoke with St. Paul Central Principal Cherise Ayers about cell phone policy right before this school year started and she made a cigarette comparison.
Enforcing the absence of a technology is hard. Our best option for society at large is something short of enforcement. Our best bet across society is to create an environment of soft, diplomatic cell phone stigmatization. That diplomacy has to come partially through shared spaces where the expectation is for zero phone use. St. Paul Central High School, the greatest high school on planet Earth, has a bell to bell no cell phone policy. Is it foolproof? Absolutely not. Is it working? Absolutely. Are stricter cell phone policies in schools changing habits outside of their walls? Personally and anecdotally, yup.
I spoke to a current Central student and two Central teachers in order to get prepared for a conversation on “Your City Could Be Better” with City Cast CEO David Plotz (I am the host of City Cast Twin Cities, Plotz is my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss). I hope you’ll give the episode a listen or watch. In my conversations it was clear that these cell phone policies can help the learning and social environment. It was also clear that this must be but one piece of a larger fabric of policies and social conventions that will bring us to an acceptable relationship with our phones.
Right now we’re in the smoking section era. The smoking section era was bad, but it was better than the insane abandon with which smoking was permitted before the advent of smoking sections. By the time we had smoking sections you couldn’t smoke on a plane, you couldn’t smoke in a bank and you could do something to nominally distance yourself from smoke in most public places. In this era we knew cigarettes were bad and we would soon learn for how many decades tobacco companies had already known they were bad. I think this is about where we are right now with cell phones.
Policies like the one underway at Central High School will hopefully bring us into the early smoking ban era. We will have a general consensus that phone use should be limited. Folks who are mercilessly addicted to their phones will experience their habit not as social capital but as a social hindrance; a behavior that distances from the heart of the thing. That is what cell phone use in a public setting does right now. It pulls you away from the heart of the thing. The cell phone user pulls their head up from time to time when they deem the conversation to be worthy of their involvement and they expect everyone else to fill in the banks. The cell phone user has been on a smoke break. She tosses out “what’s the concert you’re referencing?” as she walks through her own cloud of smoke and into your converastion. Let’s stigmatize that bullshit. We spend 51 less minutes out of our house per day than we did in 2019. Might we at least want to make the minutes we do spend outside of our house free of the warm embrace of Meta and TikTok?
Speaking of which, can I bum a smoke?