After going through and 8 hour technological detox and reading “Reclaiming Conversation” and “The Machine Stops”, I’ve obtained a hit of awareness of my own behavior and my surroundings.

Regarding my moments of reflection in the single chair, I’ve come to realize that these moments (when I am not in detox) happen whenever I’m going from one place to another, when I don’t have access to wifi, or when I’m going to bed and leaving my phone on the side. During my detox, I was going through a mental debate about some interactions I had over the week that demanded some reflection. I realized that without my distractions available for a long period of time, I just wanted to get out of my own head because it was mentally tiring to constantly think about the same thing without a solid conclusion. However, when I inevitably pushed myself to keep thinking about it, I realized I came to clarity with my thoughts when I further thought of who I was as a person and my own values exclusive of any situation. 

I normally consider myself as a person who is not into the world of social media of mass exposure (anymore, I’ve taken this approach for about a year now after realizing the superficiality of many posts). However after this excersise, I’ve realized how large my contained use of social media is. Even if I interact with top 15 people on a daily basis, the amount of media content is large. 

My friends and I have this common behavior of getting together hanging out in my living room, which I feel leads to a lot of the conversations that Turkle states as meaningful. We tend to engage in complicated debates, understand expressions, and develop empathy through hours of just sitting around in our couches. However, we do have our phones, and sometimes our laptops (because we’re supposed to be working) with us, and there will be points where all of us are just quietly surfing the web. I’ve also come to realize how used we are to sharing pictures, videos, and links. These are either conversation starters, research for validation, or just sharing funny memes. Given that 90% of our group lives in the same building (and we meant it that way), we tend to get together on our free time as opposed to having conversations through chats. Nevertheless, something similar as the “rule of three” tends to apply, where we’ll be 10 of us in a room and at least two people are on their phones at points in time. I’ve also come to realize that when a debate gets heated, those who don’t want to get involved hide behind their own screens. In this case though I don’t believe it expresses a “keep it light” but more of an “I don’t care about this argument, let me go to something that will grasp my attention”. The search for something that will grasp our attention is always there, the only reason we stay together half-working for so many hours is because we’ll eventually engage in a conversation that will last for a while and then we’ll go back to work or to our phones. 

It is a different thing to be forced into a detoxification than to read about the effects of technology and having to use your own awareness and power of will to act upon the knowledge you just obtained. Somehow, the detox is easier. You know it’s a goal you know you can achieve, but more of the fact that you know that it will end after a short period of time. With awareness, you have the choice of keeping your life the way it is, which is easier, or pinpoint behaviors to work on. As Turkle said, there shouldn’t need a tower of phone games to make us interact, and there ideally shouldn’t be an 8 hour detox in order to realize how deeply embedded these technologies are in our day to day. However what matters most is what we do after this period of reflection, how we improve our interactions, and most importantly, how we make sure this awareness doesn’t fade away 

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Both E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” and Sherry Turkle’s “Reclaiming Conversations” set out to admonish the consequences of our reliance on technology, albeit with vastly different approaches. Forster takes the fictional approach, attempting to reflect society’s obsession with technology, at times to the point of worship. Turkle’s approach is rooted in our daily experiences with phones, which have taken the role of our personal companions and stripped away much of our emotion and empathy. Both readings, coupled with my 8-hour-technology detox, have made me rethink the way I use technology.

Although the issues Turkle brings up are widespread, I do not find myself affected by many of them. I have went through a phase of using a phone in the middle of a conversation or while eating with friends, but quickly became aware of the implications of doing so. I found that face-to-face conversations will always be more meaningful than other means of communication, and that one should take precedence over the other. At the same time, there are people in my life that I almost only text, because as Turkle mentions, it is much easier to maintain relationships comfortably that way.

Other than the fact that I have no idea how to make plans with people without texting, the main lessons that I got from the detox exercise were not social at all, but rather personal. I find that I can focus more, make use of my time better, and fully engage in activities without a phone. For the first time in a while, I remembered what it was like to be bored without having an instant gratification device to save me, and as Turkle mentions, being bored is not entirely a bad thing. Like technology, it can be great in doses.

I find that the availability of technology that makes us less empathetic eventually allows us to be aware of the things that we had taken for granted before that technology’s advent. Forster’s fictional characters are aware of certain things before their world became inhospitable, but choose to shun them as they did not experience them, satisfied by the luxuries provided by The Machine. This contrasts our generation, which had grown up with the explosion of the Internet and smartphones, and is therefore aware of what things were like before, or otherwise, as Turkle heartily suggests, we can hear about it from the older generations. This awareness can help us compare and draw valid conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of the newest tech. Turkle’s suggestion that the older generations need to step in and engage in meaningful conversations with their children is vital, because as dramatic as it may seem, the world that Forster has created is rooted in at least some reality, where people are completely ignorant of the upsides of a pre-technological age and choose to embrace familiarity.

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I may have taken a more extreme approach to the 8-hour technology cleanse by also removing any form of contact to other people for the first 6 hours, and not working in any environments with music or people. Much like Turkle’s analogy to Thoreau’s first of four chairs (46), I chose to spend the time without technology to be with my own thoughts.

I have to note that perhaps on a very very normal day, I would have likely also preferred electroshocks to complete boredom when sitting alone in my quiet studio (Turkle 10). Yet in the past weekend I had several different crises I needed to mull over, including accepting a new position as a senior on campus and understanding how to best navigate the final year in university. There were several thoughts on the back burner that I wish I had spent more time turning over in my head on the flight to campus back in early September. I had delayed several conversations with myself, and now I finally had time to give them my undivided attention.

The eight hours became a time of full personal reflection and inventory. It was because of the vast number of conversations and questions in my mind that the idea of staying in a room for five hours without music or contact was actually a blessing. I began jotting down notes and webs and doodles, actually giving space to these thoughts and allowing them to unfold. I came to several resolutions and plans for the future, as well as more difficult conclusions that I needed to face. 

Throughout this time, and as seen in my journaling, I desperately needed music more than anything. I believed that any form of technological distraction could actually shift my focus back towards readings and more legitimate work. I felt a strong pang of guilt for avoiding my work, and an even stronger guilt for not being readily available to anyone that needed me.

As it turns out, a visiting friend happened to be on campus, and I missed meeting them because they contacted me at one point in the eight hours. But for the first 6 hours of no communication, I was quite okay with not speaking to anyone. I had a task at hand, and I had work to be doing, even if it wasn’t necessarily conventional. I leapt at the first chance to be alone, and took advantage of the silence instead of avoiding it. 

Having reread The Machine Stops, I noted this profound sense of “being” that is completely dependent on machinery, as quoted in The Homelessness chapter: “The Machine…feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being” (Forster). The full form of human expression in The Machine Stops world is dependent on technology for human identity and personality. The people stuck within that world believe that through their continuous schedules and lecturing they achieve spirituality. In terms of the technology cleanse, I found that I was actually avoiding several questions and conversations in my mind, and it was easy to distract myself from them through technology. I now argue that boredom may be the first feeling when entering an open space for thought, but after this boredom results in questions previously left unanswered or ignored, similar to Turkle’s observations of young children alone in the woods for a long period of time, and eventually beginning to ask questions after a few hours (26).

I am not sure how to treat this experience. On the one hand, it was kind of cool and almost hipsterish, the kind of experience you would snapchat or post an Instagram story about. Except, it was not an option. On the other hand, it was genuinely hard to control the urge to casually check my screen. Unlocking my phone has become such a routine in my daily life and during these 8 hours I realised how mindlessly I have been using it throughout the day. As an individual with a short attention span – activities that are not super entertaining and require patience, i.e. standing in a line, were a burden without my phone. What made it even harder was the context of the campus. Everyone is so close physically to each other and this facilitates 24/7 communication cycles, both online and offline. Seeing people interact in different spaces often communicates messages, because spaces here often have intrinsic meaning. Being in a different city would have probably been easier. Due to physical proximity we experience on campus, in the past years I have grown accustomed to last minute planning, so for the detox day I did not have specific plans, which looking  back seems like a bad idea. As back home, my friends do not leave 3 minutes away from me, so I do not expect to have an easy access to face-to-face communication, as it requires more time and commitment. On campus I have the expectation of seeing people often, however, without my phone, how do I know if someone is in the library, capstone corner, dining hall, or lounge? How do I know if they are free or busy? It seems socially unacceptable to just stalk people and demand their attention.  

In spite of my overall frustration with the experience, a few useful things were achieved during the day: I have, finally, redecorated and cleaned up my room. I changed the location of the furniture in my room, I hang out more with my roommates, cleaned up the common area, almost did my laundry, and did readings that were not assigned for any of my classes.

Sherry Turkle points out, that checking the phone gives people the option of knowing who is interested in them, who gets out of their way to reach out to them. Not knowing this for 8 hours was a discomfort and I experienced a relief when I finally checked my phone and knew who messaged me and what has happened in my communities during the day. In the end, I was disappointed to learn that the world did not collapse without my online presence.

I find several parallels between my detox experience, overall observations of my tech-usage habits and the readings. In this reflection I will mention two. First, I often make the excuse to keep a hold of my phone for emergency cases (that never occur) and, second, I have gotten used to the flaws of tech that I only realize when I isolate myself from tech.

I frequently tell myself that I must keep my phone of me in case there is an important conversation that cannot be postponed. I understand that a side effect to this is that I will also use the phone for procrastination, but the idea that I would make someone wait on my response or not be able to reach out myself when I need to, alarms me. For this reason, my phone was next to me during the detox as well. However, I believe I have assigned very incorrect weights to how many non-reschedulable conversations I have versus how much time I spend procrastinating. That is, I barely ever have communications over phone that are of a must-respond-now type. This thought resonated with me when reading the paragraph about the father who always took his phone with him when going for the newspaper together with his child from “Reclaiming Conversation”. “The real emergency may be parents and children not having conversations or sharing a silence between them that gives each the time to bring up a funny story or a troubling thought” (26. I realize that by worrying about potentially missing out on something I opt-in to miss out on daily communications every day.

Second resolution I have stems from how Vashti from “The Machine Stops” “did not notice the noise” (6) of the machine anymore as she had lived with it for so long. Similarly, I believe I do not notice the bad effects tech has on me, at least until I have stepped away from tech for a while. The detox might have been too short for me, but from my previous experiences (hiking for a week with no constant access to phone), the feeling is truly liberating. However, when I get back to tech, I tend to again forget about the benefits I experienced with no tech.

I was looking forward to doing this digital detox, as I’ve done it before and I remembered how refreshing it can be to unplug and disconnect for a little while. This time was no different. What added to the experience was the fact that one of my friends decided to join me in this exercise, as she was eager to try it out upon hearing me describe what the detox would entail.

Since I’ve done such a detox before, I didn’t find the experience too difficult. I wouldn’t consider myself to be someone who’s addicted to technology, as I don’t really use too many apps. I do, however, spend a lot of time on the Internet or on messaging platforms. Thus, being disconnected encouraged me to be more aware of each activity I was doing – whether it was enjoying the taste of my food, or relishing the company of friends. Sometimes, though, my mind would wander to think about the emails/messages I needed to reply to, wondering what others must be thinking if I didn’t respond promptly. The absence of communication technologies made me realize how easy it is to get distracted by our devices which pull us away from the present, from the very people and things that surround us. Overall, this experiment helped me consider how strongly technology demands my attention and time.

In the dystopian world of the short story “The Machine Stops,” people have become so dependent on the Machine for their daily needs and desires, to the point of worshipping it. Moreover, they prefer to remain in the comfort of their assigned rooms – anything to avoid the “terrors of direct experience,” of direct contact with others or with the outside world.

This fear of person-to-person interaction and increasing reliance on technology is, sadly, a reality we have come to embrace. In “Reclaiming Conversation,” Sherry Turkle highlights certain patterns of social problems that have developed as a result of our digital culture. We have traded conversation for mere connection, preferring the easy, editable platforms of online communication over the unpredictable circumstances of face-to-face conversation. In this “flight from conversation,” we’ve retreated into the safety of our technology. As a consequence, conversations are fragmented, and there is a decline in our empathic abilities. Perhaps we should all take a digital detox more often? Freeing ourselves from the “seductive undertow” of our technology, we can take the time to truly reconnect with ourselves, and with one another.

Reflection

In many ways, I felt liberated by the detox exercise. I switched off my phone for the entirety of the 8 hours, which liberated me from charging it. I was able to leave it on my desk while I was out of my room, which liberated me from carrying it around. And then as the first moments of victory faded, I began to experience the withdrawal. 

Withdrawal

With hindsight I would say that the withdrawal symptoms of technology are easy to overcome, yet they are scary because they are unexpected. Quickly after I put my phone aside, I started experiencing impulses for distraction – there was no music that I was listening to while I was preparing breakfast, there was no series (my usual choice is Archer) playing in the background – and I felt restless. After breakfast I played the guitar for 40 minutes and slowly I had to acknowledge that my thoughts cannot be hushed away easily. I let them sank in, and surprisingly my restlessness diminished a little. 

Potential 

From then, my day went more or less okay. I cleaned my room and I met some friends – which was also a bit weird, since I had to physically walk over to their place to get human contact. There was no “what are you up to?” but only a straight up visit. My trips to Ghana and Cuba came to my mind. During these trips, I was also walled off of the internet and had to “survive” without being connected. As an effect, my J-term class in Ghana got really close to each other, since to we started coming up with ways to  kill the boredom. I wouldn’t say that our bonding over football, conversations over dinner and other games is solely the effect of being disconnected, but I believe that it contributed.

The start of questioning #woke

What this assignment achieved (most likely by design) is that it made me question how I am using technology and what I am using technology for. After reading “The Machine Stops” and “Reclaiming Dialogue” I realized how my habits actually influence my individual growth. Technology is not yet serving us and our experience of life is impacted. Using technology shouldn’t mean that I or my environment is always connected. More about this in class. 

Journals

“Reclaiming Conversation” is a very thought-provoking reading, putting to context several issues related to communication technology. In many ways, technology has made us more connected to the world around us – we can easily talk to anyone anytime anywhere. Then, why is there the problem – “flight from conversation?” Aren’t exchanges on text considered conversation as well? The author makes a significant effort to define the word conversation, only allowing it in the context of real-life interactions. As technology has become more prominent, it has displaced conversations in real-life, causing people to be less emphatic, less creative, less fulfilled, and ironically less connected.

Within the frame of “flight from conversation,” the author introduces several new issues brought up by the influence of communication technology. Whether it is the “silent phone” effect, the power of the “tiny god”, or the myriad of other issues, I will use this space to address two main problems – 1. Our fear of the “First Chair”, and 2. The Goldilocks effect.

Thoreau’s “Three Chairs” gives a unique take on human interaction and the kinds of proper conversation that has been omitted by technology. Perhaps the most fundamental one is the “First Chair” – Solitude. Nowadays, being alone is often seen as a problem that needs to be fixed through technology. Personally, I felt the full effect of this during my 8-hour digital detox, fearing the thought of no one to connect to. We, as humans, are failing to sit down and reflect on our self, leading to the constant search of fulfillment through digital means. For example, can you really say you enjoyed an event if it is not broadcasted on social media and approved by your followers? Perhaps the rise of meditation might be a solution to our lack of solitude.

The next issue is elaborated through the “Goldilocks effect” – the idea that we are moving away from conversation to mere connection. If you think about it, when is the last time you approached someone through a phone-call or physical contact? The trend towards texting has transformed the nature our daily interactions. This effect is further epitomized through the short story – “Machine Stop” by E.M. Foster. As much as it is fictional, it gives a very realistic prediction to what our world has become. Written in 1909, it gives a strangely accurate description of how we are starting to fear human contact and real-life interactions.

            Rather than inventing new technologies to solve these existing problems, it might be better to look within ourselves to find the solutions.

When we first got this assignment, I was not too worried about putting down everything for 8 hours as I have done that before. The only difference being consciously choosing to put down everything for 8 hours versus subconsciously putting everything down because you do not need it. During this summer I have taken countless hours without using any digital devices because I was either too busy drawing/painting or reading for hours on end, but again, I did not prepare for any of that and it just happened. However, with our assignment I must admit that I felt a little stressed knowing that I’m going to do this on purpose and when I did, it felt so much like fasting during Ramadan. Just eagerly waiting for time to be up so you can go back to doing what you usually do.

Furthermore, I chose not to prepare anything the day ahead to fill my time like preparing readings as I still had the rest of the weekend to do them later and I wanted to do this assignment with the least amount of preparation to have a more realistic experience rather than feeling like I am preparing to avoid the inevitable. With that in mind, my entire 8-hours were filled with catching up reading comics/visual novels that I have had for too long alongside other books as well. I also did a lot of cooking, mainly out of boredom but also necessity. Since I was not staying on campus for the weekend I was not able to go to the dining hall for the assignment and ended up spending most if not all my time alone.

Some of the struggles that I had, although minimal, were figuring out how to tell time. As I realized after starting that I always look at my phone to tell time. All the watches that I had were dead and I had to go scavenging for a clock somewhere in my house. I also tend to tweet a lot about what I’m doing/the media I am consuming. So, considering that a lot of what I was doing was reading comics, some for the first time, I had no outlet for my thoughts or opinions. Although technically I do have pen and paper, but it is not the same as knowing you have an audience you would connect more with, or just share different thoughts and opinions with. Even the format in which I wrote my journal entries were like I had a character limit.