When Scarborough songwriter Natasha Valencia lost her phone three times in one day — at a coffee shop, in her car, and under a pillow — she wasn’t bothered.
In fact she felt more “in control” that Sunday in December.
When her boyfriend found her iPhone 5S and offered it back to her, she didn’t want it.
“I felt a little freer to go about my day not attached to anything, not feeling like I needed a device to get through the day,” she says.
So Valencia decided to make going phone-free a Sunday habit. Her accidental digital detox is now deliberate. Every Saturday night, instead of charging the phone at her bedside, she leaves it on silent mode in a drawer of her apothecary table until Monday morning.
“Out of sight out of mind,” she says. “I’ve noticed my thoughts are clearer on those days (without my phone).”
The products of the digital age — smartphones and laptops and tomorrow’s innovations — are increasingly met with trepidation as the “dark side” to these devices, are exposed, says technology analyst Carmi Levy. The potential to be hacked, tracked, robbed, and overworked or to become an “addict” to our devices is a growing concern. The discourse has changed from one of innovation and awe to apprehension.
“We’re increasingly looking for solutions that allow us to disconnect, and gracefully find some time to recharge our battery,” says Levy.
“Digital detox” is now part of the lexicon as weekend getaways encourage “unplugging.” Social networking sites rise and fall like the short-lived video-sharing Vine app, and other Goliaths including Facebook are losing users, according to tech research groups. More people are downgrading to flip phones, those relics of the early decade, according to research firm IDC. Nokia is rumoured to be launching a throwback to the basic cellphone it first sold 17 years ago, according to VentureBeat tech reporter Evan Blass.
“We’re finally starting to wake up to the realities of what the always-on lifestyle is costing us,” says Levy. We’re overworked and over connected. “Smartphones very quietly break down the barriers that once existed between our professional and personal lives.”
That lifestyle began in January 2007 when Apple launched the iPhone. South of the border, it was called a revolution by founder Steve Jobs. “Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” said Jobs.
Levy remembers the launch “like it was yesterday.”
“I often call these moments inflection points, and Jobs’ reveal certainly was one,” he says. Smartphones started the “mobile revolution” changing how the world communicates.
A few months earlier, Mark Zuckerberg had opened Facebook to anyone 13 and older with a valid email address. The iPhone would become the dwelling place of the social network with more than 147 million monthly active users by 2013.
For many on social media, the “always-on” lifestyle has grown toxic. Celebrities make the news now when they quit Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, decrying the “trolls, robots and dictators,” as comedienne Lindy West wrote in a column for The Guardianearlier this year. “For half a decade on (Twitter), I have been micromanaged by strangers and neo-Nazis have mined my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit.”
Some who desire an escape from their digital life literally run for the hills. A Toronto “camp for adults” asks some 250 participants to “step away from their adult persona and find their inner kid,” says Emma Brooks, one of eight co-founders of Camp Reset, an “adult summer camp and digital detox” offering its fourth four-day excursion this June at Camp Wahanowin in Orillia.
Camp Reset is four days of meditation, yoga and forest dance parties, devoid of real names, talk of work and devices, which are discarded in a ceremony at the start of the weekend. Campers take a no-phones pledge and press a giant wooden button with the word “RESET” on it.
A similar pledge was the task at hand for the mostly 19- and 20-year-old students in Trent Cruz’s “Social Media, Virtual gaming and Networked Life” class at Western University. His students defined the terms of their own weeklong digital cleanse — some cut out certain apps, others put their phones aside entirely — and wrote journal entries about the experience.
“There’s a lot of anxiety around social media, the use of it or abstaining from it,” says Cruz. This is why it was so difficult for his students to abstain from sites and apps including Facebook and Snapchat. Among their biggest concerns were the fear of missing out, or FOMO, and what to do when they were alone.
Scarborough’s Valencia learned to give herself “permission” to be alone during her Sunday detox as though the mobile revolution of the last decade forced a kind of obligatory connection. Now she’s more aware of the time she spends on devices during weekdays and how it affects her anxiety levels and her music.
On Sundays, her songwriting is easier, melodies come more quickly, without her iPhone to distract and connect her to others.
“Being alone is good,” she says. “You just kind of sit.”
Now when she’s out shopping and waiting for a friend or writing at a coffee shop, she chooses to “look around at the world,” instead of at a screen.
At least on Sundays.
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