I’ve written a lot here about our social media habits. (See almost everything on this page, including here, here and here.)
So I wanted to touch on two related conversations that have pinged on my radar this week. The first is Adrienne Matei’s piece about screen time in the Guardian. Notably, she’s working on this piece after Apple’s Screen Time roll out, which gives her a few interesting perspectives among a lot of the standard arguments.
Most basically, with math we can really up the horror from “I spend too much time doing this” to “[expletive of choice] I spend HOW LONG doing WHAT?” Matai’s own observation is that “my daily habits amount to me spending 35 days a year, or over five (five!) years of my remaining life, on my phone.” I pulled out my calculator, and did my own math. Four hours a day, my very own number from last week (which, in my defense, includes an entire e-book), is 1,460 hours. (Compare your number to the Foreign Service Institute’s Language Learning chart.)
Despite our shock at our screen time numbers, Matei also astutely notes that providing us with time data is not industry benevolence: “To big tech, your screen time anxiety is just another data point to collect, not to mention an opportunity to capitalize on the marketing value of providing ostensibly altruistic “digital wellness” functions while simultaneously escalating their software’s addictiveness – keeping the responsibility to resist squarely on you.” (The link is original to the quote, but it’s worth a read if this is a topic close to your heart.)
My real heartbreak came from this guy, though, reporter Matt: I spend an alarming amount of time on my phone. Almost five hours a day. Sometimes it even hits six, usually during periods of my life when I’m feeling bored and lonely. It’s like constantly opening and closing your front door, hoping that someone will be there when they almost never are.
Which was perhaps in the background of my mind this morning when I listened to Krista Tippett’s interview with Esther Perel:
To explain: ambiguous loss, for example, when a person is still physically present but psychologically gone, as if when they have Alzheimer’s, for example. Or if you have someone who disappeared, they are physically gone but psychologically present. In both cases, you cannot resolve the question of mourning and loss, because you don’t know, are they here, or are they not here?
When people describe to me being put on pause in a conversation or lying next to someone in bed who is scrolling through their Instagram feeds and is physically present but psychologically gone or is having literally another life with their phones, what they’re describing is not the physical isolation of loneliness. They’re describing a loss of trust and social capital that they are experiencing next to the very person with whom they should not be feeling alone. That’s ambiguous loss.
It’s ambiguous loss on the other side, too, of course, as in reporter Matt’s quote above. Maybe someone will come through this online portal to interact with me. Maybe I’ll have a chat with my friend who isn’t nearby anymore (an ambiguous loss in itself.) Maybe, maybe.
No wonder we’re so stuck.
Jessica Thinks 