By Alexander Carbone
Recently I have been asking friends and classmates alike how much time, on average, they spend on their smartphones per day. The results were about what the average college student would expect: five hours, seven hours, eight, ten, up to sixteen. However, as someone who had never looked into this before, I was honestly baffled that the numbers were so high. For a little while, I felt pretty high and mighty knowing my daily smartphone usage was averaging at about an hour and a half, until I realized most of my free time is spent staring at my laptop.
We have all heard about the downsides of smartphones, and social media, and all the ways these gargantuan tech companies are investing so much of their efforts into making our lives worse by keeping us glued to our screens. And while modern technology serves many benefits for numerous individuals, a lot of us also acknowledge how, oftentimes, interacting with technology can become problematic. Many of the people I interviewed admitted that they are not proud of getting stuck in a ‘scrolling flow state’ as they spend most of their day watching shortform videos. But you need to ask yourself, is it truly your fault? Could it be that the world has not given you a choice?
I think back to people like YouTuber Eddy Burback, who decided to spend a month of his life without a cell phone and relied on older tech to go about his days, like a landline with a voicemail and a physical pen and notepad. I think back to the Luddite Club, a club with chapters around the world of high school and college students who strive to mitigate their reliance on modern tech and prioritize in-person interactions. And I might be overidealizing here, but I see these people and cannot help but speculate that they are much happier than I am.
I want and have been trying to disconnect for some time now, but the biggest hurdle is how society collectively allowed the modern internet to permeate every aspect of living. When I ask my friends and family about the idea to ditch my smartphone for a “dumb phone,” they have tried to dissuade me, saying that there would be no way to contact me. And I find that fascinating since a dumb phone still allows for calls and texts, last I checked.
Individual willpower can help, but we as individuals can only do so much until we need to interact with the real world through modern tech and then revert back to our usual scrolling habits. I believe that we need to convince the institutions around us to allow for alternate, physical methods of communication and interaction; methods that do not require us to use a screen. But I am just one person, and I have no idea how to do that.
Maybe I am right about this, but maybe I am wrong; who is to say? If you have any opinions on this matter that you would like to share, please hand me a piece of paper with your thoughts on it. I am at the Torch office, Room A332, from 11 a.m. to 11:55 a.m. on Mondays, and from 11 a.m. to 11:55 a.m. and 5:15 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Wednesdays. See ya there!