Last week, I was waiting in line at the grocery store behind a woman and her baby, tucked into the cart. The kid was probably a year-and-a-half old, and while the mother busied herself unloading groceries onto the conveyor belt, the baby sat in the cart playing with (I presume) her iPhone. Normally, this wouldn’t have struck me as particularly odd; after all, kids are entertained by technology all the time. Even as a child, pre-smart phone, I was occasionally stuck in front of the TV set to keep me busy. But as I stood in line mindlessly scrolling through my texts, I realized that this child and I were essentially doing the same exact thing. In fact, comically enough, it looked as though the baby was texting. She wasn’t, and I was, but still; it amazed me, standing there in line, the normalcy of constant communication, the nakedness we feel without it, and the implications this has not only for my generation but for those to come.
I love my phone. I like the world at my fingertips; the voice of my mom from miles away, the friend checking in on a busy day, the quick photo snapped at a priceless moment. I like being able to Google restaurant menus and my horoscope; to check the weekly weather in one fell swoop, to listen to music in an instant. I love Shazam (I hate Siri, but that’s a different story), I think it’s convenient you can order coffee on your phone, and I don’t think I’d be able to manage half of my responsibilities (or know the lowest temperature for the day) without this source of constant communication.
But while I’m a technology user through and through, a sentiment has been creeping up on me that makes me uneasy with the glowing, growing power in my hands. I noticed it first two years ago, when I worked as a counselor at my childhood summer camp. My charges were ten years old, and perhaps it’s hindsight bias, but the first thing I noticed and continued to observe throughout the summer was that these girls were intensely more mature than I had been, having grown up without a cell phone. And they weren’t mature in a genuine way; no more intellectual, no more immune to the trials of preteen life. But they were so deeply used to constant communication that, when stripped of it at summer camp, they admitted to feeling bare without their phones, Snapchats, and Instagrams. They worshipped celebrities and imitated their wardrobes, had hundreds of social media followers and knew more people than I had at that age by a landslide. They prided themselves on “snap streaks” and loved emojis. At home, they had group chats and Facetimed regularly, from near and far. Without their phones, though, my campers were forced to embrace the hugely intimate, head-on social environment of a technology-less summer, just as I had growing up. I found myself resenting my own phone, constantly buzzing with important e-mails and obligatory phone calls on my hours off. As I spent the summer watching my campers play cards on the beach and excitedly rip open letters from home, a nostalgic jealousy swept over me. Though they were enthralled with technology at home, in the summer they were able to leave it behind, embrace their innocence and be present with each other. It occurred to me, for the first time, that there may never be another time in my life when I can thoroughly ditch technology and live completely in the moment.
With the world at our fingertips, we have endless opportunities, but also the weight of that world in our hands; the need to be responsible and accountable for our actions, for our posts, for our presence online and in reality. And I love having a phone, but I hate the way it’s glued to me, the way that, for every choice I can make regarding the way I use technology, there is a choice that society has made for me, shaping our world into a constant wonderful, terrifying network.
I wonder what the world will look like for me, a twenty-year-old hit with the phone-as-we-know-it at around age fourteen. I wonder what the world will look like for my campers, whose phones were handed to them much earlier, for the baby at the supermarket who can navigate an iPhone more swiftly than my own parents. I wonder how this network will continue to grow, what innovations will shape our “there’s an app for that” society into next, and how we will fight to remain present through and in spite of our screens.
I love technology, but sometimes I fear my own dependence, the sinking, naked feeling when I realize there is something I don’t want to live without, something that gives me so much that I can’t see what it might take away.
I love the world at my fingertips, and I don’t think I’d be better off without it. But sometimes I yearn for the world before this one, for the brunt force of life in front of us in its barest, most immediate form.
And I’ll never do it, but sometimes I want to throw my phone right out the window, and see what the world looks like without it.
Images courtesy of: Emily Stillman