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Life beyond the cell phone

Life beyond the cell phone

By Ron Srigley / One day, a few years ago, I did an experiment during one of the philosophy lectures. All of my students had failed a mid-semester exam. The reasons were numerous, but I had the feeling that excessive use of cell phones and laptops in the classroom was partly responsible. So I asked them myself what the problem was. So the exam had gone badly for everyone, so it was important to know what had not gone well.

After a short silence, a girl raised her hand and said, “We do not understand what the books say. We do not understand the words. " I was shocked and saw the other students muttering. So I thought I'd do a little experiment. I offered some extra points to those students who would hand me my cell phones for nine days and write about what life would be like without it.

12 students, about a third of the class, accepted the offer.

Without their phones, at first most students felt lost, disoriented, frustrated and even scared. So they felt like they were missing something. This supported the narrative of the mobile industry, which saw a real separation from the world. But two weeks later, something happened.

Most began to think that their cell phones were practically limiting their relationships with other people, compromising their own lives and somehow taking them out of the real world. Here are some of their statements: “Believe it or not, I had to go to a stranger to ask what time it was. "I honestly say, it took me a lot of courage to do it, because he saw me as crazy", wrote Janet. "Someone even told me I was weird because everyone has a cell phone." But Janet also described a special fact. "When I asked what time it was, almost everyone took out their cell phones before entering into a visual relationship with them."

For many young people, direct human and unmediated contact was experienced as something "uneducated" at best and "strange" at worst. So, as if there must be some kind of trust, permission, before certain things are done, for example just calling.

James, another student, noted: "One of the worst and most common things people do today is pull out a cell phone during a face-to-face conversation." But he also wrote that in this way he had the opportunity to see that he himself did this.

Emily noted that "many people used their cell phones when they felt embarrassed, such as when they were at a party and no one was talking to them."

The price of this protection from difficult moments is the loss of human relationships, a consequence that most students had not weighed before. Without his phone, James was forced to look others in the eye and talk. Stewart said: "Being forced to have real relationships with people has made me a better person, because whenever it happened I could learn to handle the situation better, which is much better than constantly looking at a phone. ”.

Virtually all students agreed that ease of communication was one of the main advantages of their phones. However, 8 out of 12 said they felt genuinely relieved that they were not forced to respond to the influx of messages and posts on social media.

Peter: “I have to admit, it was pretty phoneless all week. "I did not have to answer every message and I did not feel bad that I did not answer the phone because I was not there to ignore them."

Emily said she managed to "sleep more peacefully after the first two nights." Various students went further and admitted that communicating with others was actually easier and more efficient without their phones. Stewart: "I was actually doing things faster because instead of waiting for a response from someone (who doesn't even know if they read your messages), I called them and so I went straight to the next step."

It is often said that some tools make us more productive. But for students, phones have caused the opposite effect. "Writing a document without my phone next to it increased productivity by almost double," Elliott admitted. "You are focused on one task, and you do not have to worry about anything else."

My students' experience with cell phones is probably not exhaustive or statistically valuable. But it is clear that these devices have made them feel less alive, less connected to other people and the world, and less productive. They also make it more difficult to perform many tasks, in other words, the phones did not help. Or at least, not at all.

I did this exercise for the first time in 2014. I repeated it last year at the largest institution where I teach. This time, the impetus was not the failure of an exam: it was my desperation for the school experience as a whole.

Here I want to be clear, this is not something personal. I have a lot of passion, but the students are terrific. One day, 70% of them were sitting in front of me shopping, texting, playing, watching videos and even TV series. And this is not only done by the "bad" students, but also by the "good" ones. And the worst part is that no one tries to hide it.

Where is the problem? No one wants to eliminate cell phones from the world, but we have to weigh a fact. For many students, even the simplest activities, such as picking up a bus or train, ordering lunch, getting up in the morning, or finding a location, were activities that required the help of a cell phone. As the telephone became an ubiquitous part of their lives, their fear of being without a cell phone grew. They were nervous, lost, without their equipment.

Young people think that life without cell phones is simpler and more real, but they may no longer be able to cope with the world and society. A few days later, they felt better and got used to it easily, but everyone thought things were going well only for a short period of time. And the fact is that perhaps the finding is true. One can not hope that we can compete efficiently in life without an easy source of communication like our phone.

Do we know how these tools are changing our behavior? Most likely not. It is this occasion to begin to study the effects.

* Ron Srigley is a writer and academic who collaborates with Los Angeles Review Books, The Walrus and MIT Technology Review. This article was translated into Albanian by Erjon Uka.