Two Experiments in 30 Days: Seven Questions About Phones and Us

If you're looking at your phone, are you really alone? We were asking questions like this before the experiments, and we're still asking them now.

The phone is without doubt one of the most important things in our lives. We use it to read the news, to pay, to flirt, to kill time... More and more of life happens inside this device, and the changes have come so fast and in so many directions that we haven't even had time to work out what our relationship with it is.

We take it out of our pockets a hundred times a day and stare at a 4-to-5-inch glass screen. How much has that changed us?

Over the past two months, QDaily ran two experiments: one reporter spent 12 days traveling without any cash, while another made a long-distance trip without a phone. Before that, we tried living on internet services alone and spent 18 days without leaving home.

Each experiment had a narrow focus, and we don't pretend a handful of them can supply every answer. The changes we are living through may be a drop in the ocean of human history, but for the history of technology and for sociology they deserve dozens of books. So we want to put these questions on the table. They may lead to more questions, and we'd like to hear what you think:

Do phones weaken our survival skills?

I once asked Luo Qian, the reporter who traveled without a phone, why she always asked the elderly, street cleaners and women carrying children for directions, and never young people her own age. Her answer: "Most young people had their heads down, looking at their phones, and they always asked me back: why don't you just look it up on your phone?"

That was an instinctive response. What's interesting is that the more of a person's life the phone has taken up, the more obvious the answer seems to them. These are the young people who were, in a sense, "born" playing with phones.

Because she wasn't taking a phone, Luo Qian packed these tools

Before setting out, Luo Qian photographed the extra things she had to carry because she had no phone: a watch, a GPS tracker, cash, a book, a camera, a notebook, business cards.

And that's not all a phone replaces. Add at least a radio, newspapers, a dictionary, a camera, a scanner, a voice recorder, a notepad, sticky notes, membership cards, a projector, a planner, maps, a flashlight, a calculator...

Luo Qian's survival skills would rank somewhere around "certain death in the wild," but anyone who goes without a phone will probably meet what she met. Arrive in a new city and follow the wisdom of twenty years ago, setting out to buy a map at a newsstand, and you may not even find a newsstand. Start with Dianping or Tripadvisor, and things may be much easier.

For refugees heading to Europe, what they rely on most on the road is the phone: maps, GPS apps, social media and free information on smartphones have become indispensable tools. They need smartphone charging stations as much as they need food, water and shelter. "Every time I go to a new country, I buy a SIM card, go online and download a map to find where I am," Osama al-Jassem, a 32-year-old music teacher from Syria, told a reporter from The New York Times, describing his relationship with his phone. "Without a phone, I would never reach my destination."

We have no firm answer. In a city, survival skills depend more on temperament and experience than on whether you can use a tool. If phones do weaken them, it may be because phones have created a new environment for us. Which brings us to our second question.

Afghans charge their phones at a self-powered charging station in a refugee camp in Calais, France

Is forgetting some skills really so bad?

Forgetting some skills isn't bad. Failing to fill the gaps they leave is.

You spend hours browsing web pages, refreshing social networks and playing games. Without noticing, you not only hand your spare moments to the phone; you also chop your whole blocks of time into spare moments.

When we say smartphones may limit creativity, we mean they take away our ability to concentrate on one thing.

Perhaps you've felt it: you can't lose yourself in a book the way you used to, and you understand more slowly. Search engines are so convenient that people take the first three pages of results for knowledge, while their own thinking stalls. Even people who diligently track themselves with data and keep their information in order sometimes find their memory slipping.

Phones don't make people stupid. They raise the bar for being "smart."

In the age of pen and paper, a good reporter needed shorthand, quick reflexes, and a knack for talking to people face to face and getting information out of them.

Go back 2,000 years further: Greek philosophers could only teach out loud, and Plato's ideas survived because his disciples preserved them. An exceptional memory was almost the minimum requirement for several generations of philosophers.

Today, the demand on memory has shrunk to this: your vague recollections need only be enough to link up what's in your short-term memory. Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote, used the theory of the Extended Mind to sell his product, a service that stores unlimited information and charges nothing for the basic version.

So when we talk about forgetting skills, we have to tell skills apart. Not being able to read a map may not matter much. But losing the ability to sort and recombine information, to the point of utter confusion, may put you in danger.

Why do phones give us a so-called sense of security?

Luo Qian, who went out with no phone at all, had always been reluctant to talk to strangers. She opened up through something like a painful "forced withdrawal from phone addiction." Traveling with the help of strangers, what struck her most was this: "If it weren't for this experiment, I really wouldn't have felt how good the world is." Why did it take such extreme conditions to reach that conclusion?

For more than half of the experiment, the subtext running through her writing was "what would happen if I had a phone right now." Readers, too, seemed more sympathetic to the no-phone experiment, because they could imagine how it felt.

During her days without it, Luo Qian's longing for her phone went far beyond dependence on an object. It is a feeling worth taking seriously, and it is different from naming a teddy bear and hugging it to sleep every night.

Perhaps that is because the phone really is the only thing that stays with you twenty-four hours a day. It keeps your call log, your location history, your spending habits and your private toolkit. It even remembers the characters you often mistype and fixes them as you type. Whenever you need help, it gives you a network of people to call. At the very least, it gives you the chance to call the police.

It is perfectly normal for your sense of security to depend on a device that is always there and answers every request, because no human being can do the same.

Why do we reach for our phones whenever something beautiful happens?

People look down on 16GB phones mostly because they can't keep up with everyone's habit of taking photos.

At meals, letting the phone camera "bless" the food has become routine. At concerts, when the singer reaches the song tied to our memories, we film it on our own phones, and because we keep holding the phone up, we're no longer quite sure whether we came to hear the song or to shoot a video.

The first reason is that phones really have made photography easier.

The more important reason is that when we face a moment worth remembering, we all want to keep some fragments to look back on, and that was just as true before phones. When Roosevelt and Churchill met face to face for the first time, on the Atlantic in 1941, to discuss the world war, the British sailors present took out their cameras too, instead of quietly recording it all with their eyes.

What you get out of it afterward has little to do with whether you have a phone. Still, a line in the film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty goes roughly like this: truly beautiful things don't need to be photographed. While you shoot, you pay too much attention to shooting and miss what is changing in front of you. That may be one of the great regrets of our time.

With a phone in hand, what does "being alone" mean?

Photographer Eric Pickersgill made a series of photographs called Removed. In post-production he erased every phone from scenes of everyday life, and these sights, which we see everywhere, suddenly look eerie.

Waiting in line, waiting for the elevator, watching TV, eating, walking, slacking off at work, before bed, even in the hours that should belong to sleep, waiting in bed for a partner. In all those scattered moments, or moments the phone has scattered, everyone is looking at a phone.

Removed

In September 2013, a 20-year-old man was shot dead on a commuter train in suburban San Francisco. Video footage showed that the people around him never noticed the gunman waving a .45-caliber pistol, even though at one point he aimed straight at the victim across the aisle. They were all staring at the tablets or phones in their hands.

They were busy reading, refreshing social networks, checking video sites for what was happening thousands of miles away, and they could not see what was around them.

Wherever they are, the moment they open their phones, they are absent to the people around them.

During the 18 days of the stay-at-home experiment, I spent most of my time with no one but myself, yet I hardly had time to feel lonely. Messages flying back and forth on WeChat, text, QQ and email kept me tied to my network of people. And anyone who watched me join a meeting by video would never have thought I was "alone" at that moment.

The phone has dissolved the physical meaning of "being present." Because it lets you get online anywhere, anytime, it keeps you from ever feeling "alone on the road," and yet it can also easily make you feel lonely. The two do not contradict each other.

Since we got phones, can we stand boredom less and less?

QDaily Research Lab once ran a feature asking readers, "What do you do on the subway when you don't have your phone?" The most popular answers were: watch the silly TV in the carriage, study the route map all the way, watch the people around you, space out, look at your reflection in the window opposite, read the warning signs and the English on them, and repeat all of the above.

Why is the difference between having a phone and not having one so great? Why does one bring on a kind of withdrawal anxiety we don't even notice, like the agitation you remember from the subway ride when your phone died, while the other can even make you look forward to your next trip?

Have phones made us lose the ability to fight boredom? Every time my phone has died twenty minutes from home, I have thought about this question, and those twenty minutes felt like a long journey.

When I finally plugged the phone in, I even understood what goes on in the heads of people who step off a high-speed train and can't wait to light a cigarette.

When the phone, or rather a thing that becomes a newspaper, a camera or a game console with two taps on glass, is always within reach, you expect to wait less and less for these amusements. And as networks get faster and screens get bigger, your patience gets shorter, the way once you switch to broadband you close the browser if a page takes one second longer to load.

A related question: our lives seem more and more exciting, with every kind of internet service frantically pushing "interesting" things at you. So why are we drifting further and further from poetry?

Take Alain de Botton, who once described long-distance travel this way in The Charm of Boredom (《无聊的魅力》):

"Few places are more conducive to hearing the voice within than a moving plane, ship or train. There is a strange link between the landscape before our eyes and the thoughts that may arise in our heads: large thoughts often need large views, and new ideas are often born in unfamiliar places.

In the last stage of a long train reverie, we feel ourselves return to our true selves; that is, we begin to see clearly the feelings and ideas that really matter to us."

Have phones made us forget our manners?

There is a lot we can now blame on phones.

Being almost "always online" has broken the long habit of face-to-face socializing, and the digital world has hijacked much of the attention people used to give one another in real life. A set of manners has grown up around one idea: "put your attention where it belongs."

Or, to put it another way, the manners phones have broken now send new social signals. "Not looking at your phone" signals that you take the occasion seriously. When one person takes out a phone near the end of a meeting, it means roughly what "glancing at your watch again and again" used to mean: shouldn't we wrap this up?

And people used to being alone with their phones, when they share a room with older relatives who depend on phones less, keep checking their phones out of habit, which comes across as rude without their ever meaning it.

What makes people forget their manners may not be the phone, but empathy that has run dry.

To borrow a line from Maugham: "In the journey of life, you must cross a great stretch of dry, barren, treacherous wasteland before you can step into the living, real world."

Phones may make this wasteland look especially colorful and beautiful, but a wasteland is still a wasteland. Telling signal from noise is still up to you.

Cover image from Huffington Post