Normally during these types of events, the moderator asks you to please silence your cell phones. I’m going to do the exact opposite and ask you to turn on your ringers and, if you’d like, turn off “do not disturb” mode. [pause for people to do this]

Okay, now for my talk:

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up? [pause] Maybe you kiss your partner good morning. Or maybe you reach for your journal to write about that dream you had last night wondering just why a talking owl was convincing you with a wink that you too, can fly.

What’s the last thing you do before you go to sleep at night? Maybe you turn your tableside lamp off after reading a wholesome book. Or put down your guitar after strumming a tune.

Or maybe, just maybe, the last thing you have contact with isn’t your partner or your own mind, but your cell phone. Maybe the last thing you do is scroll for several minutes, maybe even hours, through spoon-fed content.  Maybe the first thing you do is shut off the alarm on your self-phone, and OH how convenient, you might as well check your texts and likes while you’re at it. 

With this project, I selfishly wanted to be rid of a device that had control over me. I wanted to know if I could live the life I wanted without it. During the first two weeks, I experienced withdrawal symptoms that confirmed for me what I already knew: I was deeply addicted to my self-phone. These symptoms included increased anxiety, boredom, anger, and feelings of social isolation. During the latter two weeks, I experienced a cognitive liberation that confirmed for me what I only suspected: my self-phone was doing me more harm than good. I found myself more engaged with my work and my books, more present with the people around me, more spontaneous, and overall… happier.

At first, I couldn’t help noticing and being aggravated by the prolific use of the devices. During my bus rides home, roughly 4 out of 5 people were in some digital realm as they stared at their phones or listened to their music. No one seemed to be talking to each other. No human to human interaction whatsoever! My emotive aggravation subsided as I became more comfortable with just paying attention to my own thoughts.

Overall, my biggest takeaway is that my self-phone stripped away my inner-life. Before escaping the device, my thoughts were never left uninterrupted, because even if the phone wasn’t in my hand, it wouldn’t be very long before I wondered if I had received a text and felt the need to pull it out. Newly created down moments that started off as boredom quickly turned into journaling, thinking, and conversations with close friends and family on my landline phone. 

The way we interact with the world through these devices is fundamentally changed. I can best try to elucidate this for you by describing my relationship with a hobby of mine, colloquially referred to as birding. Last year, I became interested in birds after going on a life-giving adventure to see the Greater Sage Grouse as they fluffed up their air sacs and tried to find a mate for the season. Waking up before the sun and driving out to the middle of a mountain plain, I waited eagerly with a group of fellow humans. We heard them before we saw them. The unique swinging pop noise, quickly followed by a sunrise that revealed their wild strut display. There was something so beautiful and odd to this species of bird I’d never even heard of. It seemed to revitalize that mystical part of myself that is in awe of the wonders of the world, wonders that I’m not always even aware of.

I was hooked on birds. I downloaded two very useful apps, Merlin, that helps you identify birds by recording their calls, and eBird, an app that tracks your location as you record the birds you’ve seen out on an expedition and adds them to something called a life list. 

After using these apps, birding started to lose its magic. It became extractive as I reduced their lives to a list I kept in my phone. I didn’t have to learn how to identify them on my own because my phone did it for me. If I saw a really cool bird and I didn’t have my phone on me, I would feel upset that I couldn’t ID it and add it to my life list. 

What seemed to be a useful tool slowly massacred my sense of wonder. Let me repeat that: it massacred my sense of wonder. Birding became gamified and I didn’t feel any deep connection to these wonderful prehistoric creatures like I once had. After getting rid of my phone, I started to become excited by even the most common of birds again. “Look at that robin T’d up on that tree! It’s magnificent, isn’t it?” And it really is, if we are only able to notice it for what it is, rather than how it can be datified.

After a month passed, my friend who was holding on to my phone for me brought it into work. He set it down on the desk in front of me. I felt physically revulsed. When giving it up, I was so anxious to part with it, could I live without it, I wondered. When it was being returned to my life, I was just as anxious, could I live with it, I wondered. Like a toxic relationship with an ex-lover, I feared I would be roped back in.

To conclude, I feel as if the self-phone is a socially encouraged addiction that requires us to always be on standby. It is a complex multi-tool that deteriorates our cognitive independence, distributes our consciousness, and becomes a part of our ontological understanding of ourselves– hence my referral to it as a self-phone rather than a cell-phone.

How many of you have checked your phone during this hour-long presentation? How about just during the last several minutes during my talk? With this conversation, I wanted to try to keep people engaged without any bells and whistles. I wanted to see if we were able to, as a group of people in 2023, just sit and engage with these thoughts. 

If you’d like to share your reactions to this project with me or if you have any questions, I welcome you to join me in the Grad Lab, room 235, upstairs for cookies and coffee. My brilliant colleagues Eli, Graham, Jake, Branson, and Conor will all be upstairs and eager to talk to you about their projects as well. So if you haven’t had enough of us– and how could you ever have enough of us– we’d love to see you upstairs.

I will leave you with this: have you ever had a dream where you were scrolling through Instagram or TikTok? Have you dreamt about a really enriching text conversation or a cat video on Youtube? If so, maybe you are feeling fulfilled by the life you are living with your self-phone. 

But I sure wasn’t.

Thank you all for listening. We’ll see you upstairs.