Limiting the Unlimited

On Friday, I grabbed the keys to a school van and loaded it up with baseball equipment and a handful of my players. Our last game of the season was against our in-town public school, a hated rival from just 10 minutes down the same road our school is on.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, the van was pretty quiet. Sure, it was Friday, and the school week leaves teenagers drained and dragging (until Friday night rolls around, at least). But this silence resulted from something else.

I picked up on it when I heard noises coming from the lap of my shotgun passenger. He was playing a game on his iPhone. And a quick survey of my rearview mirror revealed that his teammates were all doing the same thing. Nary a word was spoken. Every set of eyeballs - except the driver's - were glued to a tiny touch-screen.

The next morning, we played a just-for-fun scrimmage, some players, some parents and siblings, and me ending our season with some light-hearted competition. A couple hours swinging the bats, throwing a tennis ball around, and trying to hit a jack over the tantalizingly close homerun fence on the softball field. After six innings of ball, the sprinklers going off, and a lot of laughs, we put a cap on the season with a 12-10 victory for the home team. I came out on the losing end but managed to take a ball yard.

After the game ended and we cleaned up after ourselves a bit, six players were left in the dugout, waiting for rides. Again, an almost unbroken silence reigned where laughter and jokes should have been. Six sets of eyes focused on smartphones. Game over. Time to text.

This is a tough issue.

I tried to resist and stood strongly on my soapbox for ages, but I, too, have a smartphone. At first, I turned the cellular data off to keep temptation at bay, but one can't even picture message without it. So now I had the internet in the palm of my hand. I made a rule that, just like when my iPod traveled with me in my pocket, I'd restrict my data usage to WiFi, with exceptions for times of legitimate need (like the maps to get directions or Safari to find an address or store hours). I've survived the first 3 months pretty strongly accordingly to those rules, but the compulsion becomes so strong when the boundaries evaporate and those little red numbers appear on my apps.

Ultimately, I don't necessarily think there's a great moral absolute at play here. Smartphones are not inherently evil. The internet is not inherently evil. It comes down to, as always, intention. But given the prevalence of internet access and the constant ability we have to shift our attention to a handheld device, I think intention has to include omission.

Even if shifting our gaze down to a phone isn't evil, might preoccupying ourselves from other things around us be a move in the wrong direction? My concern isn't so much that phones drag us down. It's that too much use of our phones keep us from realizing each other.

Facebook, other social media, and our phones should supplement our personal relationships, giving them new avenues in which to grow an exist, but those things should not become the primary means of communication and sustaining relationships.

Think of the waiting room at your doctor's or dentist's office. Typically, you'll be in for a long wait, so you grab a magazine to pass, or even "kill", time. Nothing wrong with that. Get lost in the political issues afoot, or catch up on Hollywood happenings. Too often we are starting to treat any "down" time as being like a waiting room - meeting up with friends at a theater or mall, waiting for a table at a restaurant, a lull in conversation - and that's scary.

I can't tell you how many times I see people standing around in a circle looking at their phones instead of chatting with each other. I have pulled my phone out just because everyone in my vicinity has gone there and I don't want to be left out. I have pulled my phone out because I sometimes forget that this potential for conversation used to be our default.

It's a dangerous trend for us to default to a smartphone, to a personal, customizable world rather than to community with others. Sometimes, we go to our phones to share an article, a video, a picture, to include others, start a conversation, have a laugh; sometimes it's pure compulsion. We are increasingly drifting to that set of square icons to check up on the social scene rather than partaking of the one in our midst.

The trend is present in ads, and it's kind of a chicken-and-egg scenario - do the ads reflect what we're already doing or do the ads goad us toward behaviors by their power of suggestion?



I showed a Droid commercial to my students. Some of them understood the implication of our phones' becoming literally one with us as seriously dangerous. Others dismissed the commercial, saying that we don't have to do something just because a commercial tells us to do it. My question remains...



Then I think of this Sprint commercial, which implies that everything we do should be captured on our phones and shared, without our devices or their data pools limiting our activity. I am all for the opening of information, for more and more to be readily available to be researched, discovered, learned.

I am grateful for Blogger and the chance I get to compose thoughts and disseminate them widely. However, I don't bare 100% of my soul on this blog. I share myself openly and genuinely, but there are things that are private to me and my family or friends. I tell stories and offer insights, but a fraction of my life remains my own, unpublished to any social platform. Again, I'm not saying Sprint will eradicate that boundary or that we ought to get rid of it because Sprint told us to do that. However, the trend is real, something for us to confront and reflect upon.

Do we feel the need to be plugged in 24-7-365? Why do we have to check for little red numbers every 5 minutes? Can we go without sharing things with others? Can we go without checking what others are sharing?

My point is not to poo-poo smartphones or apps. I just hope everyone can stop for a moment to reflect upon their habits or compulsions.

I need to recommit to my WiFi rule. I need to trust that emails about my potential new job or my plans for grad school will not go anywhere even if I don't check and see them right away. I can let myself play 7 Little Words and Crosswords while in the bathroom but not while sitting at a table amid conversation.

How can you create fair and just limits on your usage? Can self-denial lead you to realization? What moderation might you need?