How Portable Screens are Taking Over our Lives

or: Start Your Day With A Glass of Water Instead Of A Facebook Binge

(South Park)

I’d like you to try to remember the very first thing you did this morning. How were the first, say, ten waking minutes of your day spent?

I know that I, for one, wake up every morning to the sound of the classic “alarm” ringtone blaring through the tiny speakers of my iPhone and jolting me out of my deep slumber. My first few moments of consciousness are usually spent stumbling around my apartment, locating and eventually neutralizing the offending device — which I then clutch as I groggily retreat back to my warm cocoon of blankets.

Depending on how much I have to do that day, I’m then likely to spend anywhere from the next five to fifteen, and I’ll be honest sometimes even fifty minutes on my phone.

I often slip into such a trance while scrolling through my Facebook feed that I suddenly catch myself, realizing I’m no longer even attempting to skim the posts — they become reduced to nothing but a steady stream of images, text, and advertisements rolling past my eyes, no longer even being consciously processed. What I keep telling myself is a choice proves itself time and time again to be a compulsion.

Maybe I’m just being a “grandpa”, which is what all of Kyle’s friends on South Park called him when he complained about their addiction to smartphones. Fine, I’ll allow for that possibility, I could be nothing more than a stick in the mud stuck in the past. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think Matt Parker and Trey Stone were on to something, because there’s something about this that deeply unsettles me.

Fifty minutes is almost an hour and there are only twenty-four of those in a day — many of which we have to waste sleeping as a precondition of being human. The fact that such a significant portion of my day can slip through my fingers so quickly, that my mind can become such an empty, non-thinking vessel so passively and that I can abandon my perception of time so easily genuinely scares the shit out of me.

Maybe I just took The Matrix too seriously or perhaps I should have read George Orwell in high school instead of Aldous Huxley, but it’s hard to deny the astonishing rate at which humanity is racing full speed ahead towards our brave new world when you take a step back. Here’s a quick rundown of some stats on Facebook and the other apps/companies they own:

-Over 1 billion people use Facebook every day

-900 million use WhatsApp every month

-700 million use Messenger every month

-400 million use Instagram every month

All of those companies exist under one corporate umbrella and they all functionally serve the will of one man — Mark Zuckerberg.

Despite now owning less than a quarter of Facebook’s actual stocks and having promised to sell almost all of his shares before his death, Zuckerberg has taken care to make sure that he’s retained 60% of the voting rights on the board of directors. It’s clear that he recognizes how inconsequential any amount of personal wealth is relative to the power inherent in essentially controlling the attention of billions.

A degree of agenda-setting power on the scale of the influence possessed by ABC, CBS, and NBC combined at their peak as the “big-three” American corporate news outlets decades ago is now effectively wielded by one man.

This worry, of course, is compounded by the fact that Facebook employees recently leaked information to the New York Times about the company’s recent work on a new censorship tool — likely laying the groundwork for an attempt to re-enter the Chinese market with the blessing of their single-party authoritarian regime.

It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around the enormity of what’s going on here. Forget the idea of the President of the United States as “the most powerful man in the world”, forget the sideshow of Donald Trump for just a minute and reflect on the absurd amount of power Zuckerberg has managed to consolidate in the private sector.

Again, maybe I just shouldn’t have watched The Matrix but for some reason I can’t shake an overwhelming feeling of existential dread watching Hollywood’s favorite baby-faced Harvard drop-out flashing a cheesy smile and donning his company’s new virtual reality headset. No wonder some professors got together to create a database of literally everything Mark Zuckerberg says.

Now you might be expecting me to propose some dramatic, absolutist, “this is where you either take the red-pill or blue-pill” solution. I see how it could seem like that’s where I was going with all this. Don’t worry, I’m not Morpheus and that’s not what I’m going to say — mainly because I don’t think we’re quite there yet.

Instead, I think right now the most we can ask of our fellow humans without risking hypocrisy is not necessarily to make any concrete changes, but rather to simply to adopt a new paradigm — one of awareness. To be clear, I don’t deny the inevitability of technological progress. As the wise young Kyle Broflovski pointed out, many of my best memories are of sitting around the T.V. with my family and that’s just another screen after all, only a lot bigger than the ones we now keep in our pockets.

Kyle still had a point though, even though the T.V. was a screen as well, there was something back in the days before the information age became pocket sized that we seem to have lost now.

He said that he felt like “our living rooms are dying”, the human connection that came with gathering in one room to watch something together, the resulting conversation, all of that is lost when we resign ourselves to one room and live through our personal devices. Now we text each other when we’re in the same house, we stream our own shows on our own laptops and we read our own news on our own feeds.

Where’s the tipping point when new technology ceases to enhance our lives but instead dominates them? Are we even capable of recognizing it? Have we gone long past it?

Those questions are way too existential and impossible to answer, so I prefer to start with much easier, more practical ones. For example — what’s the first thing I should do when I wake up in the morning?

As it turns out, the difference between taking a morning dose of Facebook and drinking a large glass of ice water is substantial. As it also turns out, I lack any substantial amount of self-control (sometimes I’m amazed I’ve made it this far in school) so I must administer self-discipline instead.

Therefore, I impulsively deleted the Facebook app from my phone. The best way I can describe the result is that it feels as if I let a little bit of air back into my lungs. Countless minutes I had grown accustomed to routinely giving up have now been returned to me. For a while I would compulsively pull out my phone, only to realize that I hadn’t gotten any notifications and the app was gone so I would no longer be getting that short-lived shot of dopamine my mind had come to associate with the little blue square of glowing pixels. It passed, and now I feel just a little bit less attached to my phone.

I still go on Facebook all the time. I have an Instagram and a Twitter, I use Snapchat, Groupme and take five-minute Ubers to school. I’m just as hopelessly addicted as the rest of you. I hope nobody mistakes my humble plea for any sort of holier than thou attitude. That’s not my intention.

I’m just asking us to take a step back and consider the ramifications of all this, to simply think about it. Socrates supposedly said something along the lines of “the unexamined life is not worth living” at his trial, I think he was right and that his words are worth reflecting on in light of how much of our time we unquestioningly sacrifice to such fleeting, meaningless entertainment. Now there’s no need to go and do anything dramatic like quitting social media, but maybe it would be worth it to try something small like starting every morning with a glass of water instead of a Facebook binge.