Please Let Me Go Back to 1985

In terms of phones, I wish I was in 1985. I wouldn’t mind the clothing and synth, for that matter. A smart phone logged into a gmail account tied to work or school is, to me, the equivalent of people installing phones in their car or carrying a proper brick of a mobile phone in the 1980’s, albeit now the phones are more stylish and much, much, worse in our case. If I could trade places with someone carrying those bricks and wearing a 1980’s double breasted suit I would in a heartbeat. I say this after hearing my girlfriend say that she knows where I am based on where she can see my phone. If you can see my phone in the kitchen, I must be there, or will shortly return. My phone represents my presence to her. Why? I’m tethered to my email. In some degree of good, I also keep it near to text my mom, as we text each other back and forth every day. She raised me, single parent, for important pieces of my life, so I like to talk to her when I can. My email is my window school, work, and bills. Without email I’d be very behind, and, very happy. You could probably correlate my cortisol levels to the number of emails I receive per day and if they come from my genetics professor. When I should be relaxing at the end of the day (in the perhaps 45 minutes I’m left with after homework) I’m clacking away on my laptop checking emails and reading them all.

A central component of this is located in the now outdated term “mobile phone.” Our phones can go anywhere we go, collecting data from our Snap Maps, location enabled apps, amazon purchases, gmail contents, and even microphones if authorized in a police case. Our phones, by virtue of the data they collect on us, serve as a proxy of our bodily location, financial transactions, desires, even our feelings by use of Facebook’s revolutionary addition of the heart emoji or sad emoji (can you hear the sarcasm on that last line?). Of course, this makes the assumption that you carry a smartphone. Not all people carry a smartphone, however with growing pressure to be able to check your gmail or your chase mobile, amex, capital one banking app, few people seem to be able to resist the temptation. My grandmother (a woman skilled with cooking meats and eggs and not with computers, something I’m just fine with) recently purchased a cell phone, and if she can figure out how to use it, will send a text to me.

Now, you can reach me anywhere data or wifi will reach, and that’s everywhere but the bowels of a few medical buildings. Without cell service we welcome the presence of a pager in medical buildings; my preceptor carries one phone and two pagers at all times. (She has more phones than Kevin Gates.) I’ve developed the now common behavior of thinking my phone has just vibrated and reaching down to find no notifications, or even no phone at all. As much as I love the joke that this is just my FBI agent logging on to to check on me, it concerns me that my brain has developed such a connection with phone usage that it now sends out a false “ping” to get me to check it. This is my anecdotal evidence that phones are in fact an addiction and tied to the release of powerful neurotransmitters. This is my brain trying to re-up and get its fix.

The statement that follows reflects my bias, and due to that bias is perhaps a bit a of a generalization. I feel that phones are the death of us, specifically the death of social us. When a few of my friends go out to dinner, seconds after sitting down they place their phone screen facing up on the table. They frequently go on their phone over the course of dinner, and reply and respond to people who are not present. As such, I don’t go to dinner with many people. I feel this habit to be rude and antisocial. I often think that someone who’s imbibed a bit of liquor is better at conversation and following social etiquette than a person on their phone. 

Why do we have our phones close to hand and closer to mind? They contain an ecosystem. More than simply putting forward an answer of the fun of instagram and its kayfabe, I believe that our phones represent a complex microverse in which we hold the immense power of constructing our identity. We can omit facts in our bio, post pictures only from the good angle, and keep that curated lifestyle. You hold the ability to restrict what people know via your phone and the apps it contains, and can lie with almost total impunity. This is a phoenix you control. Now, from the death of social us (ettique-wise in previous paragraph) our phones allow the creation of a new social media you. You can be anyone you want to be online. A smartphone is a hybrid of human and non-human actants through it physically being a non-human piece of technology that embodies values, preferences, and locations and is therefore a signifier of its human owner. My phone is a signifier by its location being equal to my location by the data it collects on me. In this online digital ecosystem you are your own creator. The rules are few and the feedback is delivered right to the phone in the palm of your hand.