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MortonBastFirstEssay 3 - 13 Jan 2017 - Main.MortonBast
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| | | And she wasn’t. I got a phone, and then another, and another. Every two years like clockwork, my battery started to fail and I reluctantly accepted the free upgrade that it coincidentally happened to be time for. I really never wanted a smartphone, or the mindless enslavement to responsiveness they seemed to engender, but eventually I got one, because my last flip-phone’s battery gave out too. I thought hard about paying actual money for a new battery instead, but gave in to the forward march of technology. I got a shiny new Samsung, feeling like I’d sold my soul for the price of a battery. | |
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< | And I can’t stand the thing. The more useful its features purport to be, the angrier they make me. The Swype technology that suggests what words I want is always wrong. The MTA BusTime? app that is supposedly tells me when the bus is coming induces false hope and sends me flying into a Monday morning rage. The symbol that means it is finding my location shows up all the time for seemingly no reason. It runs my life, and badly. | >
> | And I can’t stand the thing. The more useful its features purport to be, the angrier they make me. The Swype technology that suggests what words I want is always wrong. The MTA BusTime? app that supposedly tells me when the bus is coming induces false hope and sends me flying into a Monday morning rage. The symbol that means it is finding my location shows up all the time for seemingly no reason. It runs my life, and badly. | | | Why carry one? | |
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< | Given that my “smartphone” (hereinafter “personal tracking device) is both a powerful system of surveillance and a source of endless frustration, why do I continue to carry it around? I have been reflecting on the question since it was posed at the beginning of the semester, and I find that my answer stems from two powerful illusions that it creates: social connection and security. While I am not immune to more superficial draws like convenience and sexiness, the far stronger links that chain me to my personal tracking device come from the impression that carrying one makes me less lonely and less scared. | >
> | Given that my “smartphone” (hereinafter “personal tracking device") is both a powerful system of surveillance and a source of endless frustration, why do I continue to carry it around? I have been reflecting on the question since it was posed at the beginning of the semester, and I find that my answer stems from two powerful illusions that it creates: social connection and security. While I am not immune to more superficial draws like convenience and sexiness, the far stronger links that chain me to my personal tracking device come from the impression that carrying one makes me less lonely and less scared. | | | Lonely
In early 2012, I was a brand new editorial intern at TED Conferences and a still brand new owner of a personal tracking device. At TED2012, I heard Sherry Turkle’s TEDTalk “Connected, but alone?” and felt like an alarm bell was going off in my head. Turkle explained how attempts at constant connection deplete the capacity for solitude, resulting in a far worse sense of isolation. I understood instantly that this was true and terrible, but felt powerless to escape it on my own – if everyone I knew had divvied up their attention into bits, who was left to connect with in a whole, full way? |
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