Life Without a Cellphone: Thoughts on [being disconnected]
I, like most people in their early twenties, grew up without a cellphone for most of my childhood. My dad had the Nokia brick, and my mom had a weird walkie-talkie flip phone with a huge speaker on the outside. I had my friends' home numbers memorized, and I was really good at politely asking my friends' parents if so-and-so was home.
I got my first cellphone in seventh grade, ten years ago, when I had to be picked up at a different school than my brother for the first time. It was a pink Motorola Razr, and I remember spending countless hours going through the pre-downloaded ringtones and freaking out if I accidentally clicked on anything that linked to the internet (data cost a fortune).
This is how we wielded the power of being able to record cellphone videos in 2006. What a time to be alive.
Then, a year later, I got my first smartphone: the Blackberry Storm. This was a strange iPhone-Blackberry hybrid, with a full touchscreen that you clicked like a button. This was the first time I could take front-facing camera photos (the word selfie hadn't been invented yet, kids), and the idea that I could access the internet on this tiny palm-sized device was amazing to me. It wasn't until 2010 that I got the iPhone 4, and I truly embraced smartphone technology. It was no longer "cool" to have a smartphone—it was just a given that you used apps, played phone games, and texted your friends constantly.
I think it's safe to say that millennials were the last generation to spend most of their childhood in a world that was not constantly connected. My younger sister is 11 years old, and she has had an iPod with internet access for years and a cellphone for over a year. She texts and uses social media and takes selfies.
When I was my younger sister's age, in 2006, I wouldn't even join Facebook for another two years. YouTube was only a year old, and I hadn't ever seen a video on it. A year later, I would get my first iPod: the shuffle, 2nd generation, that could hold 100 songs. I wrote letters to my childhood friends in the city where I'd gone to elementary school. I used my mom's boxy old Dell computer to log onto AIM (AOL's instant messenger) when I wanted to talk to my friends and couldn't use the landline. We were so disconnected over the summer that a boy (who was technically my boyfriend in the sixth grade) went to camp, didn't tell me before he left, then AIM'ed me over a month later to tell me where he'd been. And at the time, it wasn't that weird.
But life isn't that way anymore, thanks to technology.
Over the past month, my iPhone 6 has slowly been fading to an untimely death. After the iOS 10 update, the battery decided it would stay charged for shorter and shorter periods of time. Two weeks ago, my phone was on life support—it needed to be charging pretty much 24/7 to work. It frequently died at 60% or even higher. And with class and teaching schedules being the way they are, I would often spend half or more of my day without a cellphone. Then, suddenly, early last week, my phone decided to completely give up. It died and could not be resuscitated.
I haven't lived a day without a cellphone, at the very least, since 2010. Every day of my life, I have been connected to my friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, texting, FaceTiming, etc. Social technology has been especially important to me in my relationship with Ryan. We've been long distance for long periods of time twice now (first, four months while I studied abroad in England, and now, as we wait out the three years while I'm getting my MFA in Minnesota), and without communication technology, we wouldn't be able to see each other or hear each other's voices.
Going completely without a cellphone for two days, and spending a month with limited cellphone use, made me realize just how attached I've become to my smartphone. It has integrated itself into my routines: I check social media before I go to sleep and when I wake up, I Snapchat Ryan all day every day, and I use GPS all the time because I am navigationally challenged.
Have you ever been talking to someone on the phone and halfway through the conversation freaked out because you don't see your phone around you? That's the kind of anxiety I felt for the past month. After seven years of constantly carrying my phone in my pocket or in my purse, it felt so unnatural to leave it at home and not have access to my friends and family all day. Obviously, my involuntary social experiment wasn't as intense as going completely off the grid, as I still had access to the internet through my laptop, but it did remind me of life before I had a smartphone—the good parts and the bad.
I was reminded of how disconnected I used to feel before my cellphone, especially as someone in a long distance relationship. When I didn't have a cellphone for whole days or significant parts of them, Ryan and I just got out of sync and disconnected. We didn't get to do our usual routine of seeing what the other person was doing throughout the day, saying good morning and goodnight, and always having that person on the other side of the phone to tell about something interesting or crazy that happened.
However, there were, of course, benefits to being so disconnected. It forced me as an introverted person to reach out to the people around me more—to ask for rides to events, to make small talk instead of messing around on my phone before class, to be more intentional with my interactions. I was less distracted from my class work and was more productive without the constant lure of social media.
This experience also showed me just how reliant we have become on cellphones. I use my cellphone as a GPS, so not having a phone seriously crippled my traveling abilities. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to get my phone fixed in Mankato or if I would have to go to the Apple Store in Minneapolis, and the thought of driving to the Twin Cities without GPS made me want to curl up in the fetal position. As a very anxious person, I also dreaded my walks across campus in the dark to my car after late classes or driving at night. I couldn't help but imagine getting into an emergency situation without being able to call 911.
All in all, I was happy when my fully functional replacement phone arrived at the end of last week. I've enjoyed returning to knowing what's happening with Ryan's day and not missing meetings because of my lack of alternative time-keeping devices. However, this was a good reminder that with the ever-increasing pace of technological advances and interconnectedness, it doesn't hurt to take a break from our phones every once in awhile and remember what it was like to be a kid who didn't know what a "Facebook" was and had never seen a YouTube video.
Unplug and plug-in, kids.