An unfortunate fumble lead to this examination of the strange co-dependency developing between smartphone and wielder. Grab a couch and shrink your own self too!
I've made real progress. I used to pull it out without any cause, sometimes every 5 to 10 minutes. Now it's about once every other hour if I haven't heard a notification. Sometimes I'll hear an email, and just let it set for a while. Recently I've been muting it due to a napping baby, and often forget to unmute it when I leave the house. That might be more practical than a Crown Royal bag. :) Wonderful piece.
Hmmm ... muting. Not a bad idea, I suppose. I guess that practicality is not really what I'm going for here, though. That's what got us into this mess in the first place, after all: or, as I might say, practicality, taken to its logical extremes, becomes extremely impractical? Still, it may be useful in the future. I do generally find, though, that the vibration of the mute setting still conveys the arrival, or rather, the summons, if you will -- assuming that I have kept the machine on or close to my person, as a dutiful caretaker of its techno-magicalness (which, of course, I generally have). I would like to suggest that the truly magical presence of afore-mentioned "napping baby" might have supplanted at least some of iPhone's mesmerizing properties? I understand that's how these dear creatures work. And if that's so, I say hooray. Hooray! Many thanks for the details on your own ascetic triumphs in the smartphone tug-o-war match, and the moreso, for enjoying the piece.
I recently made a deal with my wife that I would stop checking my e-mail so often during the day. I was literally checking my email once every 10-20 minutes. Why? When you're around someone else and doing this, you are essentially telling them that your email is more important to you than they are and well.... that's just not cool. So far, so good. I will say that I read your piece from my phone. I like the photo you use for the piece, did you put that together?Well, that about wraps up my reflections for the moment. Anyone else want to share? What’s the climate of your relationship with your smartphone? And do you ever get the eerie feeling that it’s working against you?
Indeed I did. That is a couple'a faces of my very own iPhone, fragmented differently. So perfect you read it on your phone! And that's the truly beautiful thing about the Thing: it really does bring us so much (as, for example, my own bit of techno-farce). The important (and increasingly difficult) thing is to make sure it's bringing us what we want. Every time we pick it up, we are essentially advertising to ourselves. For whom? Well, I think, for Advertising, writ large. The very thing itself. i.e., anyone who is open for business and up for paying the cost of access. I like what Baudrillard (apparently) said: "We can no longer tell the difference between real and imaginary needs." Nothing illustrates this better than the iPhone, and its set of intensely personal dilemma. Cheers to your armistice on refexive iPhone access, and long live your biologically driven communications!