Unplugged

smarthoneDenziens of the San Francisco tech scene are greeting the sun at a series of Daybreaker Digital Dextox dance parties in Mission District lofts. Before they emerge into the workday world to spend an average of 10 hours a day looking at the screens in their lives (PC, TV, smartphone and now watch) they leave their electronic devices at the door and joyfully pound the keys of old-fashioned typewriters and dance in the jingle-jangle morning with one hand waving free, far beyond the reach of crazy smartphones.

Back to the future

Elements of the Millennial generation relish moments of freedom from the anywhere, any device, any time connectivity that has defined much of their world since birth. In Noah Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young, the young New York hipsters Josh and Marina spin vinyl, write scripts on typewriters sitting at hand-made desks, and eat home-made ice cream. Nevertheless, private moments are captured on their iPhones and GoPro’s and they make full use of technology to shoot and edit their films.

Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain has made a conscious decision to completely unplug from technology once a week in what she calls “technology shabbats”:

We make a beautiful dinner on Friday night, then Saturday we have an amazing day doing things that don’t involve screens. We go outside, we do a lot of art projects.

In learning to reject a slavish adherence to the cocoon of technology, people are choosing to employ the products of Silicon Valley as tools to enhance life while finding ways to keep their boundaries intact. Of the many reasons to reduce your dependance on mobile devices the utilitarian (regaining 22 days a year of your life) are far outweighed by the ones that will improve the quality of your life (creating, conversations, self-worth, awareness, mental clarity).

The Digital Detox Manifesto makes a compelling case of disconnecting to reconnect.

Keeping it real

In a recent book reviewed in the Weekend FT, author Matthew Crawford writes in The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction about the way attention sculpts the self. FT reviewer Sarah Bakewell notes that

For Crawford, the Enlightenment started a process of separation that ended in our modern divorce from reality and from each other. Every time we thumb through our screens on a crowded train, we find an escape, but we betray our right to occupy the world and hone our skills in it.

The smartphone, she notes,

isolates us and helps turn us into what Simon Schama has recently called a “look-down” generation: always lowering our eyes to a representation of something not there…

A decade ago Sun Microsystems wanted to portray the future. They hired actors to carry mock-up smartphones and stand around the Embarcadero waterfront in San Francisco. They then superimposed a graph showing the rise in the number of phones in the world. Today, that picture is obviously a fake only because there are a half-dozen people not using a phone. It’s also outdated because a graph on the same scale would extend up through the conference center roof, as the number of mobile phone subscribers approaches the total world population.
Sun_Embarcadero

Feed your head

Perhaps it’s time for a new mantra to supplant the one made popular almost 50 years ago by Timothy Leary. Today, the time might have come to Turn Off, Tune Out, and Drop In to reality.

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