Thoughts on unsmartening my phone

I have a flip phone. Specifically, it’s a lesser Nokia and what they call a “feature phone,” which means it can do a few things that a smartphone can to a lesser extent. It’s a compromise that suits neither the terminally online nor the privacy-loving libertarians in their bunkers, but it perhaps fits those who wish to be slightly less confused when operating a portable telephone and don’t want to chance buying an ancient candy bar from an internet stranger. If I enabled Wi-Fi, I could theoretically browse the Internet on a ludicrously small screen. Just how mobile-friendly is your website?

The basic rationale behind the downgrade was a desire to cut down on distraction. I never really got into social media, but gosh, Wikipedia sure is easy to get to from a smartphone, and that custom news feed isn’t gonna read itself. They’re machines designed to grab your attention away from more rewarding things. Let’s throw in some nontechnical hand-wringing about privacy, too. Sure. The details don’t matter much anyway. Go ask a nerd if you need the full sales pitch.

The day I left my new carrier’s brick-and-mortar outlet and poked at my new phone in the car, I suddenly became less accessible. If anyone wanted to reach me while I was away from my PC, then they’d have to call or text me—no chat apps, no emails. Even particularly sophisticated MMS messages might not come through. Everyone and everything else would have to wait. The world grew a little larger.

Of course, there are downsides. I can’t check the weather from my pocket screen. I’m SOL if I really do need to look something up on the go. As far as games go, I have Snake. These are all things that I think most people can live with. More important than those, though, is the fact that everyone connects over the internet now, and chat apps have replaced the telephone network as the pipelines supporting these connections. This is with good reason, as I wouldn’t give out my personal number to randoms, either. Handles are safer and more informal. If I depended on one of these to keep in touch with friends or (somehow) get paid, then I probably couldn’t do it. Luckily, 99.9% of my phone messages went to my boyfriend via Telegram, and the other 0.1% was mostly SMS.

This is just one of the latest major developments in “unsmartening” my daily life. Where I as a young bat once thought the house in the movie Smart House was the coolest shit ever, I would now rather know that my television, electric kettle, and lights have zero of six senses and do exactly what I expect when I flip the switch without requiring a software update and without risk of being hacked by some teenager in Europe. I actively spend time away from the screen on occasion, which, again, would surprise my younger self. My eyes aren’t as dry, and the outside world looks more attractive, filling me with the unfamiliar urge to just go...out.

The phone is a different situation. It’s a link to that sexy outside world, supposedly, and I’ve just rolled it back fifteen years.

I haven’t gone off the grid and into hiding, of course. We have computers. I get emails and write physical letters. Even so, for all of the good downgrading my phone has done for me, it gives me pause to consider why I didn’t feel like I gave anything up. I imagine some would feel disconnected, but I was never really connected to begin with. The instant back-and-forth of IM is actually intimidating to me. I regularly took (and take) upwards of a minute to type a single line; of course I didn’t spend a ton of time in that arena, and the reasons why amount to “I just don’t work like that.” (I was born some time after the creation of the capital-I Internet and have a perfectly adequate WPM on a real keyboard; ergo, it’s not a skill issue.) IM itself isn’t to blame, though, because I could take any number of routes to connect with people, and the ones I always choose are the slowest possible methods that I only use for socializing every once in a while.

The force pushing me to step out feels like air rushing out of a space station’s tiniest hull breach and into the vacuum of space. My old phone got sucked through it and made the breach just a hair’s breadth wider. Sooner or later, that little satellite’s gonna run out of oxygen and Tang.

As of this writing, I’m getting my batty hand-feet wet with some multiplayer games. No Overwatch or League for me, but some can-be-chill survival games seem fun. Meeting folks over games seems more productive than going out and expecting conversations to happen, though it doesn’t replace the experience of a social setting. (What? Limiting screen time? When did I say that?) Depending on when my work gets done, I'll be going to the coffee shop after to chill out with a chai latte and scrawl some story notes in this rad new journal I got for Christmas. How else am I gonna work my way up to being able to go to a furry convention?

Not being able to whip out my smartphone to distract myself from self-reflection is the best and worst thing.

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