Something went profoundly wrong with the transition from analog to digital. Our moment-by-moment attention is being pillaged by a tiny machine that all of us carry with us at all times.
Our phones became our best friends, but then they started being clingy and never letting us rest. Notifications fly by constantly. There are multiple sources from email to social media to news sources and so on. We are no longer left alone to think for ourselves, much less engage closely with family and friends.
We’ve all been fighting this battle for years. There was a time when all of this action seemed fun, part of the information revolution. It seemed like nothing could go wrong—until it went very wrong. We all know this now, and we are working on strategies to deal with it.
My first step was to turn off the sounds and leave the phone to vibrate only. That was a minimal first step. The second was to get a handle on my notifications. Never accept the defaults. I ended up only accepting notifications for direct phone calls and text messages that come directly to my phone number and not through some application from socials.
There things sat for years. I was proud of myself for being among the de-digitized. I would try never to pull out my phone during dinner or in face-to-face conversations. I started carrying real books on planes. I was in resistant mode—with a profound unawareness of how much addiction there remained to conquer.
Two weeks ago, I found myself in a 10-hour recording session in a movie studio, and they were quite strict. The makeup person told me to turn off my haptics. I cannot say I had ever heard this word before. It’s kind of a creepy name tracing to tactile touch. In effect, haptics are the way our phones touch us with vibrations.
She showed me how to turn them off entirely. Go to settings and sounds and click on haptics. Set them to off in silent mode.
I put the phone in my breast pocket with utter confidence that it would not buzz me. It was then that I realized that I had not previously really been in control. This machine was residing right by my heart constantly to remind me that something important was happening outside of where I was. I had become used to it. Now for the first time in many years I experienced that precious thing: actual peace.
I had supposed I would turn haptics back on but no. I have left them off. If I’m expecting a call, I can leave the phone on the table and see it when it is ringing. Otherwise, I really love not being interrupted. It has a freeing effect. Just being rid of this beast is a relief. Yes, I’ve ghosted my own phone. When I want to use it, I can, and whatever notifications have arrived can be easily seen and I can respond when the opportunity permits.
Just think about how insidious this word haptics really is. It is of 19th-century origin, derived from Greek for “I touch.” It refers to information garnered by means of touch, and hence braille is a language dependent on haptics. Now consider its application to digital technology.
Think of it: You are not touching your phone but just the reverse. It refers to the capacity of the phone to reach out and touch YOU.
That’s creepy to me. No inanimate object has any right to be touching me anytime it wants.
Another factor is that they might have called these haptics because they did not want to call them vibrations. If they had called them vibrations, we might have turned them off. Turning them off disables the whole of the ability of the digital titans of industry to manage your life. If you get wise to the game, their profits get dinged pretty hard.
I’m only suggesting here that you outsmart them. Take back your life. You will thank me for the tip.
Let’s get a bit more radical. I was in a hotel last week, a suite with two full rooms. Very nice. But each room had a gigantic TV in it that took up most of the wall where a pretty painting might be. At least both were off, but it got me thinking. How did we come to this place as a society in which we put up giant monitors to display whatever nonsense the outside world wants us to believe?
Any time I enter a superstore of any kind, I see massive displays of gigantic TVs for sale. The whole thing mystifies me. I’m fine with watching a movie on my laptop. Nothing is so bad about my vision that I need the action blown up 1,000 times to enjoy it. How big does a TV really need to be? It’s gotten absurd, not to mention decoratively unseemly.
How about a living room without a TV at all? Maybe it has an oil painting, a buffet, wallpaper, family photos? Would that not be better?
When I was a kid, the TV was still rather new, and ours was tiny and black and white. Yes, we watched, but it was not always on, and it wasn’t very impressive. So instead we did weird things like play outside. Eventually we got a color TV. We eventually had an entire piece of furniture of which the TV was the center.
My wonderful but naive parents thought that was fine. As a result, the TV was on from the time I got home from school to the time my dad went to bed, so perhaps eight hours a day. I recall that it never stopped blasting, even at dinner. We got used to it. To be sure, the shows were better and maybe somewhat innocent as compared with today, but still. Why did we allow strangers to feed constant communicative content into the home? This was a mistake.
Years ago, I threw out the TV and have no regrets. I see no reason not to watch movies on a laptop or an iPad, and even the family can gather around. If you need a bigger screen, is there some other way to keep it around aside from making this beast the presiding god of the home?
This requires a rethinking. Sometimes you just have to pull the plug. You might be shocked at how much better life can be.
Even if you are not ready to go there yet, it’s a good time to rethink your whole relationship to technology, starting with haptics. No, your phone should not be permitted the right to reach out and touch you 100 times a day. It’s nuts. We need to be the masters of technology and not the reverse.
