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Lately, I have been playing a game with myself, and I’d like to invite all of you to play with me. It’s called the Phone Challenge.
As readers of this fine blog establishment know, I spend all day reading the entire internet and writing some of it. During what I think of as the High Pandemic Era (2020–2021), I was surprised to discover that despite gazing at my laptop screen all day and rarely leaving the house, I was still somehow spending four hours a day on my phone.
Seemed like a lot, to be honest.
Since then, I’ve been trying to see how low I can go without sacrificing my social relationships. Sure, I have internet friends — or, as I think of them, the people who live inside my phone. But I also stare at a laptop all day! And yes, I want to stay in touch with sources, friends, and family; that was the point of a phone when it was still a landline, after all.
But that landline comparison got me thinking. Even when I was a teenager and spent hours talking on the phone with my friends, I think I used it less than I do now. What is my life like if I stop treating my phone as an entertainment device and return to treating it as a tool?
This is the Phone Challenge: to use my phone as little as possible without sacrificing its real utility.
This approach has been pretty useful for me, actually! Look:
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The point isn’t to limit my contact with the internet — I still get to use my laptop as much as I want. But my laptop use is more deliberate than the way I used to pull out my phone for no reason, and my laptop doesn’t go everywhere with me.
I still use my phone as a phone a lot! I prefer phone calls to video calls because I like to pace while I talk. Most of my phone calls with friends and family last from half an hour to an hour. Obviously, talking to sources is pretty important to me, and those calls are usually about half an hour each. This use is unlimited, because phone calls are the original point of owning a phone.
I don’t think I’m the only person who is reevaluating their relationship with social media. I’ve written before that I think the internet is rotting: Google Search is increasingly useless, which means that there’s a fire starting in the library of Alexandria; the archive material of ordinary human experience is beginning to vanish. For me, Twitter was the social media site where I made internet friends who became real-life friends; now that Elon Musk is attempting to create a super app, it’s less useful to me.
I’ve got other tailwinds on my little game. The endless login prompts that signify desperate attempts to create walled gardens disgust me and make it easier for me to simply close a tab. The increasing amount of AI glurge polluting the open web also makes me less sure I’m connecting with a person when I read something, and connecting with other people is the entire point of the internet for me.
Obviously, this has been on my mind for a while. But as the era of Web 2.0 is ending, I feel I have a golden opportunity to try something new. I haven’t thought seriously about my smartphone use since I got a BlackBerry in 2008. This is as good a time as any!
