Notes on a Nervous Planet(25)
10.Accept uncertainty. The temptation to check your phone is down to uncertainty. That’s what makes it so addictive. You want someone to get back to your text but you don’t know if they have. You want to check. You want to see the promise and mystery of the three little circles, dancing with hope. You want to know how your photo or status update is going down. But why do we need to know right now? Why can’t it all wait till after your lie-in/meeting/walk/TV show/ meal/daydream? Do people really need to check their phones during meetings, or while attending funerals? Maybe if we understood that the checking is never fully satisfying we wouldn’t. Because there is no end to the uncertainty. There is no final checking of your phone. Think of all the times you checked your phone yesterday. Did you really need to so often? I certainly didn’t. I have definitely cut down, but still have a way to go. How many times do you touch your phone a day? Or look at it? It might be hard to keep count. The answer might be well in the hundreds. Imagine, I say to myself, if you just looked at your phone,say, five times a day. What catastrophe would occur?
Glow
I USED TO be obsessed with glowing windows and streetlamps when I was a kid. From the back of the car I would stare out and look at windows glowing pink through red curtains, like ET’s chest, and wonder about the life going on inside. There is something about the glow of artificial light that I find mesmerising. When I was eight years old – in 1983 – my parents had an old AA travel guide called Discover America and it had a double image of the Las Vegas Strip as seen at night. ‘I want to go there,’ I announced to my mum, to her distaste. She never took me.
‘It’s late,’ I say to Andrea.
We read a little, then switch the lights off, always later than we should. Every time, I imagine the square light of our window turning black, to anyone walking by outside.
‘Night,’ Andrea says.
‘Night.’
It will be some time after midnight and the room will be dark except for the glow of a phone.
‘Matt, are you going to go to sleep?’
‘I tried. My mind’s racing.’
‘You should put the phone down.’
‘It’s just my tinnitus is bad. This distracts me.’
‘Well, it’s stopping me going to sleep.’
‘Okay, sorry. I’m putting the phone down.’
‘You know what’ll happen if you have too many bad nights.’
‘I know. Night . . .’
And I close my eyes, and my mind still races with a thousand worries, attracting attention like illuminated signs in Vegas, tainting my dreams and waiting to dissolve in daylight.
How to get out of bed
1.Wake up.
2.Pick up phone.
3.Stare at phone for 72 minutes.
4.Sigh.
5.Get out of bed.
Alternatively, once in a while, try skipping stages two to four.
A problem in your pocket
WHILE WRITING THIS book, early in 2018, I was asked by The Observer to contribute to an article where lots of writers asked the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith questions. I took the opportunity, not least because I had seen Zadie Smith at a couple of literary parties when I was newly published and had been crippled and mute with anxiety and hadn’t dared to go over and talk to her.
I had read about her social media scepticism and how she values her ‘right to be wrong’, and so I asked her, ‘Do you worry about what social media is doing to society?’
She didn’t mince her words, and started with a critique of smartphones.
‘I can’t stand the phones and don’t want them in my life in any form. They make me feel anxious, depressed, dead inside, unhinged. But I fully support anyone who finds them delightful and a profound asset to their existence.’
Although a self-described ‘Luddite abstainer’, Smith does think the time is right to look at how we’re using this technology. ‘What is this little device in your pocket doing to your intimate relationships with others?’ she asked. ‘To your behaviour as a citizen within a society? Maybe nothing! Maybe it’s all totally cool. But maybe not? . . . Do we need it resting by our pillows at night? Do our sevenyear-olds need phones? Do we wish to pass down our own dependency and obsession? It all has to be thought through. We can’t just let the tech companies decide for us.’
I use my phone a lot more than Smith does but despite that – or maybe because of it – I share a lot of her anxieties. And there are signs that even those working for the tech companies are concerned, which means we should be even more worried about where those stupendously powerful companies are leading us. For instance, it’s been known – at least since The New York Times reported it in 2011 – that many Apple and Yahoo! employees choose to send their kids to schools which shun technology, such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos.
There are also many tech insiders who have come out to warn against the things they have had a hand in creating. There was the guy who invented the ‘Like’ button on Facebook, Justin Rosenstein, who has said that technology is so addictive his phone has a parent-control feature to stop him downloading apps and restrict his use of social media. And, as a side point, it is worth mentioning that the Facebook ‘like’ function is also what helps the data miners understand who we are. Our online likes reveal everything from our sexual orientation to our politics, and can be harvested to better influence us, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, where reports suggested 50 million Facebook members had their data improperly accessed by the British firm that helps businesses and political groups ‘change audience behaviour’.