Image by Carrrrrlos via Flickr
Annons
Annons
At first it was difficult and annoying and I suffered a few fair moments of being stood up, locked out and sometimes quite simply forgotten about. But soon, I began to notice a shift in the way I looked at the world. I stopped waking up with somebody else's problem chipping away at my psyche. I started to being able to separate day from night, life from work, important from trivial. There were no more "hey guys, we really need to get on this one-pager today", no requests to get anything in first thing. People started making more of an effort to accommodate me, and in return I started to live by Greenwich Mean Time, rather than my own time. I started looking out of bus windows, reading and watching more and thinking about myself less.I felt like I'd somehow cheated the system. By refusing to get a phone, by not being around at everyone's beck and call, I had become exempt from everyone else's bullshit. Sometimes I see people having email conversations at ungodly hours and I can't help but feel like I'm watching some strange tradition that I'll never understand, like some weird religious festival in a small town that I'm only passing through. It simply doesn't feel like my shit anymore.Before it gets twisted, I am not a luddite, a timelord or anyone who would consider themselves 'retro'. My work and understanding of culture is almost entirely rooted in the internet. Like most of my generation, I like trainers, techno and Twitter, Worldstar fight videos and illegal football streams. I believe in the power of technology.I felt like I'd cheated the system. By refusing to get an iPhone, I had become exempt from everyone else's bullshit.
Annons
It struck a chord with me. I started researching more into people who didn't own them. Kanye claims not have had one for three years (although Google Images suggests otherwise), Werner Herzog doesn't really use one, and writer Mark Fisher described them as "individualised command centres". And perhaps even more legitimately, there's been a wealth of worrying studies and statistics detailing the impact that they can have on us. A recent survey suggests that 58 percent of Britons feel unhappy or stressed when separated from their phones, for fuck 's sake.These phones have had a fundamental effect in our concentration levels. Look around you when a train is late, or when you're on a journey of any kind, or even in the pub, and you'll see that people are horribly, pathetically obsessed with them. Staring into them for the answers but getting no real insight, some even thinking its okay to hold entire conversations while looking at the screen. We've become reliant on them for everything, to the point where we don't learn directions, where we don't need to know how to talk to people, where we simply can't be without one. Where the very threat of losing one makes us a bit weird.Look around and you'll see that people are horribly, pathetically obsessed with their phones.
Annons
Annons