A Pocket-sized Pied Piper

One man’s opinion of the use of devices and the devices that use us.

It was a hot day in July, and the heat was shimmering off the asphalt when we drove by the steakhouse. Eight citizens stood outside, staring at their hands as though wondering what had gone wrong. None looked up as I drove past.

In a fit of visionary impulse, I wondered what would happen if I took their mobile devices and used them as the proverbial carrot-in-front-of-the-horse. If I were a sci-fi novelist with a flair for conspiracy, I would write a novel about a sect of technophiles following Pokémon Go’s big brother to a Jim Jones’ style fate. The potential implication would be endless.

The internet culture alternately repulses and entices, and this problem is a catch-22 that catches me in the gut—between my wallet and better judgement. (After all, if I want to get that blue light off your face, I shouldn’t be sending you this email, right?)

The web has its good points, but it is a life changer, and I wonder how much we have traded up. Maybe you can help me. Any observant person can see his fellow humans idling as they the stare at their phones for an average of three hours a day. It doesn’t take a social researcher to see the death in that.

We need to bring this slippery thing onto our terms. Pocketing your phone while everyone else is ogling theirs is not enough. We like to call them tools—they are good ones—but what happens when they begin to rule us? “Lo, we have become tools of our tools,” Thoreau said, and we have to wonder who is boss when we jump every time the phone beeps.

First off, let’s not make more of this device than it is. There’s an attempt to anthropomorphize them—that is, assign them the attributes of a human. “The GPS brought me this way” or “I read on Facebook” heaps the liability of misinformation on a medium that has no way to carry blame—it’s like blaming the paper for the credit card bill. It’s the old Adam and Eve trick, except the Eve in this case can’t talk back. The internet is a medium—everything on there has been put on by someone, and if we choose to follow it, it is a reflection on us or perhaps the informer, but certainly not the medium.

The last time I said “the GPS brought me,” I had an epiphany of the nonsense of the statement. As a bit of irony, I was clutching in my paw a copy of Neil Postman’s Technopoly; The Surrender of Culture to Technology. To make it worse, my brother-in-law was along. The GPS nothing! I chose to follow it, mindlessly, into the middle of this strange city without retaining a spatial clue.

We trade ease for ability. We call ourselves masters of our fate, but we are only master of our fate in that we choose our leader, at which point the leader victimizes us to the destiny. If we upload our memories onto google drive and tuck our friends into Facebook and our jam our brains in our pockets, we risk the death of interactive, engaged, observant people. “Let me see what it says online about it...”

It’s a bite-sized culture, a virtual smorgasbord of know-what-you-want-and-nothing-more, but most of it is high in sugar and low in protein, the brain Twinkie. Who needs to know that Princess Meghan is a vegetarian (or not)? Or what bearing does it have that the Chicago Bulls lost again? We will clog our vital arteries with useless carbohydrates of trivia by two means: the essential is lost in the sea of irrelevance, and we are not approaching it from the proactive premise of use.

Then there’s the time: two hours of screen time a day is 730 hours a year, or 30 days. I don’t want to galvanize you with unwarranted information, so let’s put it in perspective. Those two hours might be spent during lunch break, while you are doing business, or when you don’t have much else to do, which makes it difficult to see how much time you are using. But just think, if we could shave off a solid half hour a day—that half hour we spend looking at selfies and pictures of other people’s food—in a year’s time we could accrue two weeks of 12- hour days. You could read a number of books or finish a useful project with that time.

All right, author boy in a fit of weltshmerz, you say. What are you going to do about it? Crawl into a cave and suck an opossum bone?

Not just yet. I think there is still a little hope for you and me. It has become obvious that we won’t change the world in the face of indefatigable ‘progress,’ but we can still take control of our own lives. The world is actually an interesting place if we can just get our heads up. “We cede control over our minds at our own peril,” said Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains, a book that shows we are doing just that. The apostle Paul said he would not be brought under the power of any. What is it going to take to become the master of this tool? Here are some suggestions.

Lay the devices out and ask yourself, “Who is the boss?” (Don’t ask the phone now. Siri [or Alexa] will tell you whatever it was programmed to say, and we don’t want to anthropomorphize.) But ask yourself, “Who decides what route I take? Who decides where my attention goes? Who decides what I do with those spare five minutes I have lying around?”

Take a moment to be still—King David recommends it. Drink an entire cup of coffee, or take a pre-dawn walk with all distracting business laid aside. This is not some abstract Greek muse about the benefits of not existing or some Zen practice of mindfulness or Yoga art of meditation, but just a good honest think about things of consequence.

You’ll have to prioritize this. Yes, that’s what we have become—a people who must cultivate being still, or we risk not knowing what it is at all. Stillness scares many. In fact, if I am not much mistaken, the overtones of clamor are the mellifluous sounds that cover the screams that come from deep within, and the business of internet use contributes to the noise.

Keep in mind that with everything gained, there is something lost. Combine that with the fact that value is more circumstantial than intrinsic—that is, blood, sweat, and tears are the currency that heighten value. So, by the ease of communication, a text isn’t as meaningful as a handwritten letter. By the ability to instantly order any book, we lose the treasure hunt aspect that readers love. In history, the cheapening of anything has come at the cost of quality, so reducing information to a consumer product will come at the demise of quality. Information is latent knowledge, and to regulate information intake is the quality control of knowledge. Solomon wrote, “Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.”

Virtual time has little capacity to bloom into memory—have you ever heard someone wax nostalgic about their computer gaming days? Let’s get our hands on things—a map, a chisel—and get our minds engaged with the surroundings and the problems that need to be solved. We risk becoming a culture whose version of living on the edge is trying a new restaurant without researching it online first.

We hear this siren song every day, and it comes from our pockets. It’s a little voice, but a clamorous one, a pseudo-friend that promises more than it delivers. Remember, we choose our leaders, but by not intentionally choosing our leaders, we have inadvertently chosen them.