Digital fools

Am I a digital fool and a slave to my smartphone? I am sitting with my wife in a restaurant. I look up from our table and see another couple at another table, both staring at their phones. I want to make a disapproving remark, then notice that my wife is looking at hers. I swallow the thought and return to the glowing screen of my own phone. Stop. Wait a moment. Shake my head. Surely this isn’t normal. I said normal, but what is normal?

Have you noticed the little badges on app icons telling you how many new things are waiting just for you? I have begun to suspect their makers use them as bait. So I sit on the toilet with my phone, tap the lit-up icons, and feel disappointed that none of them contains anything new I care about. Even so, I keep looking.

Once upon a time I could keep up with Twitter and even read my friends’ Facebook posts and look at their photos now and then. I don’t do that anymore. The highly sophisticated ranking of posts that locks you inside your bubble has taken away what little illusion I had that I freely choose what interests me. It will get worse: machine learning and petabytes of data will be used to keep us in those bubbles longer.

I am trying to develop a few basic habits that will help me survive this jungle without looking like a complete slave to social networks and phones.

• I have started using newsletters again as a source of information, such as those from O’Reilly or InfoQ. Then I don’t worry about missing an interesting article. I save articles that catch my eye for later in Instapaper; you can’t tell enough from a 140-character post.
• I turn my phone face down so it doesn’t distract me or tempt me to keep staring at it.
• I put my phone in my breast pocket so it is harder to reach when we are out for a walk. Sometimes I leave it in another room.

What I haven’t managed: I cannot stop reading company email and Slack in the evenings and at weekends. It is a terrible habit. You stay under a strange tension, feeling that something might pass you by. As a very wise colleague once told me, if you are always dealing with something, you will never come up with anything. You have to learn to switch off and let your brain idle.

Why am I writing about this? I wonder whether you have habits of your own for resisting it, or whether I am the only one who feels like a digital fool and a slave to a smartphone.