My worry about the possible downside of smartphones began well before anyone I knew owned one. It was the fall of 1998, and I was walking on a street in downtown Chicago when I saw a man talking on a cell phone while veering through heavy traffic in a Lexus. My thoughts turned to the operator of a giant crane working high over my head. The crane was swinging huge steel rods that would soon anchor one more tall Chicago building. I wondered if the crane operator ever took calls on his cell phone.
Back then, my thoughts didn’t include the word “multitasking,” but years later, when my wife and I had moved to the Upper Valley, I began to think about it and wrote an essay for an online forum at Dartmouth called “Slowing It Down in the Classroom: Technology and Imagination.” My commentary was partly an attack on an influential essay about multitasking, “Hyper and Deep Attention,” by postmodern critic N. Katherine Hayles.
Hayles begins by describing how college students think. They are drawn to “hyper attention,” she writes, instead of “deep attention.” Deep attention requires concentration on something like a novel for a long time. “Hyper attention,” by contrast, “is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks,” resulting in a high level of stimulation and leading to a low tolerance for boredom.”
My quarrel with Hayles was not about her diagnosis, but with her prescription. She calls for a “constructive synthesis” of deep attention and hyper attention in the classroom — that is, using multitasking to hold students’ interest. Maybe instead of fostering multitasking in the classroom, I suggested, we needed to show our students the benefits of giving focused, contemplative attention to the people and places around them. I had observed students in groups or pairs on the Green who appeared as likely to be texting as conversing with their actual companions. Feeling present to people far away seemed to detach students from their surroundings.
“Slowing It Down in the Classroom” didn’t stir up much discussion, but recently I found a book by Sherry Turkle of MIT who shares my worries and more. In Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Turkle says “these days we find our ways around conversation.” And she begins with this assumption: “Face-to-face conversation is the most human — and humanizing — thing we do.” Turkle, too, worries about college students who are afraid of making mistakes in direct conversation, so they choose texting, email and Facebook instead. Fearing isolation and boredom, they turn to their smartphones.
For several years I’ve corresponded with a man who values isolation and doesn’t fear boredom, but he would probably give everything he owns for a smartphone. Jason Goudlock, 41, entered prison at the age when many people go off to college, and he has spent almost half of more than 20 incarcerated years in solitary confinement, often choosing “the hole,” as inmates call it. Goudlock has come to believe he is safer and better able to read and think and write when in isolation. He completed a novel, Brother of the Struggle (2014), and has written relentless criticism of Ohio’s prison system on a website developed for him by a volunteer interested in prison reform.
For Goudlock, the technology that often separates people from each other when they are together holds out the promise of connection on the internet. His access is restricted: When in isolation, he can send his handwritten essays to the man who controls his website. He chooses isolation despite the fact that two years ago the Ohio Parole Board imposed on him the harshest penalty it had, a five-year extension of his sentence. He believes he remains in prison because of his relentless criticism on the internet of the Ohio prison system and his unconventional preference for isolation. To him, a smartphone would seem like a lifeline.
But most of us haven’t learned how to use smartphones constructively or politely. In my extended family, the younger generation is asked to leave phones and tablets in the other room when we gather for dinner while adults come smartphone-equipped, ready for a text or a call with the hint of urgency needed to take them away from the table. If our dinner conversation isn’t interrupted by a call or text, someone will ask a question or make a claim that invites checking with Siri or Google. Easily accessible knowledge, one of the most appealing benefits of the internet, often shifts the focus or simply interrupts the flow of good talk. We often “find our ways around conversation,” as Turkle says, and I’ve wondered what to do about it.
Old-fashioned patriarchs or matriarchs might try edicts, and some probably have. But technology-challenged grandmothers and grandfathers like my wife and me find it hard to issue edicts. And of course it isn’t just our family. We know texting while driving is dangerous. Or take behavior like “phubbing” — maintaining eye contact while texting. Up-to-date neurological knowledge reveals you cannot be fully attentive to people no matter how intensely you gaze into their eyes if you’re simultaneously texting someone else. The behavior is deceptive and impolite.
Seeking stimulation online when you find yourself in boring conversations or meetings probably means you’re not taking responsibility for redirecting the talk with a question or comment that might make it more interesting. And insisting on resolving a disagreement with texts or email when someone asks for a meeting is a form of rejection. Both are instances of bad manners.
The sense of unending urgency created by jingling and vibrating smartphones gets in the way of civility and causes stress. “Chainsaws and computers increase both macho productivity and nerdy stress,” the poet Gary Snyder wrote several years ago. He might have said the same about smartphones, and one thing our society doesn’t need in this time of severe political polarization is more nerdy stress. Maybe it’s time to call out digital bad manners.
Bill Nichols is a resident of West Lebanon. His most recent book is Finding Fox Creek: An Oregon Pilgrimage.