The Last Word On Nothing

This spring, I listened to an interview with Tiffany Shlain, whose family has spent the last decade-plus observing a tech Shabbat: turning off all their devices for 24 hours, once a week. Back when her book first came out, in 2019, I might not have been as interested. We were those parents who wouldn’t let their kids on screens during the week. We didn’t even have an iPad, much to our kids’ dismay.

All my beloved screen rules went out the window with the pandemic, and now our house has twice as many screens as people. So I heard about the 24-hour tech pause, I was in. I started turning my phone off at dinnertime on Saturday night, and turning it on again 24 hours later.

But even though my phone was still off, I found myself still reaching for it. And not just to check my texts.  One Sunday morning, while I was driving to go surfing—one of the things I decided I was going to do with my screen-free day—I had a memory of some embarrassing moment. (I can’t remember which one. It’s a long list.) What I do remember was shrugging my shoulders and trying to make myself small to avoid the memory. Then I reached over to touch the blank screen of my phone.

When I came to, a moment later, I was horrified. I’d reached for my phone like it was another person, the same way I sometimes put my hand on my children’s heads to reassure both them and me that we’re still here, we’re still all right. With no one else there, was it really my phone that was reassuring me?

Around the same time, I was reading a book by Roland Barthes for a writing class of the short notes he wrote in the months and years following his mother’s death. Some entries are as short as texts. I was intrigued, and started doing some research about him. He wrote a lot about semiotics—I still haven’t really figured that one out—but what caught my eye was recent research that connected Barthes’ writing to my problem, my consolation: the smartphone.

Lead author Julie Funk, a doctoral student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, is interested in the way people talk about technology, and how we frame our relationship to technology as a result. How we use—or misuse—technology is often thought of as an addiction, she says. But Funk, as a masters’ student at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, wanted to explore how we interact with smartphones in a different way.  “What happens if we change the language we apply to the problem?” she says. Could we develop more nuanced ideas about our relationship with our phones, instead of falling into moral panic?

Barthes’ writing gave Funk a scaffolding to reconstruct this relationship. In his 1977 book, “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments,” Barthes writes about the complexities of love. Love can include anxiety, particularly around the fear of losing love. You can wait in anticipation of love, and feel dependent on the person or people you love.  And when you’re separated from someone you love, these feelings of anxiety, waiting, and dependence can increase. As well as being a reflection of how we act with those we love, Funk says, “In many ways, I think that’s a more accurate description of how we interact with the material things in our lives.”

To explore this, she and her colleagues first conducted an online survey about how people related to their smartphones, based on four terms Barthes used to talk about love: waiting, anxiety, dependency, and absence. The researchers found that many of the respondents framed their relationships with their phones using these ideas.

They then recruited five of the survey respondents—ones who reported having difficulty spending three hours or more away from their phones, and who often slept with their phones—for the next phase of their study. The research team designed a technologically-enhanced pillow that holds a smartphone in a zippered pocket. When the smartphone is first zipped inside the pillow, a sensor makes a series of red flashes and sounds that resemble a heartbeat. If the participant moves around in the night, the pillow’s sensors “wake up” and repeat the heartbeat flashing and sound for about 10 seconds. In addition, the pillow records if the user takes out their phone in the night.

Funk designed the pillow to be provocative, with uncanny lights and sounds. But in looking at the diaries that participants kept about their experiences, she found that the pillows were often a comfort. One participant, whose partner was away during the period of the study, felt reassured by the presence of the pillow with the phone inside. The heartbeat sound also played into this connection: another participant wrote that they “felt a little warmth in [their] heart” when seeing the pillow, with its phone heart, flash.

There’s at least one product that provides this protected phone experience for events like concerts and classes, but Funk is more interested in how this pillow might affect how people look at technology. “We just want people to have new ways to think and reflect about the relationship they’ve established with their phone,” she says.

My tech Shabbat has had mixed success—I always enjoy it when I do it, but here I am, writing this on a Sunday afternoon because of my own poor planning. I have tried to start thinking about my phone in a different way. When I reach out to touch my phone, even when it’s off, I try to pay attention to what I’m looking for.

And if the answer is that I want to connect with someone else, six days of the week, I turn it on, click on the little icon that looks like a phone, and use it to make a call—to hear the voice of friends who I miss, who I worry about, who I can’t wait to see again soon.

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Image by Flickr user Farouq Taj under Creative Commons license