For the month of July, I'm part of a formal group not using their smart phones. The group gave us each a flip phone, which we can use to call and text. Also we can use our other devices in whatever way we want during this month. Right now I'm on Zoom with my writing group, paying attention to emails, and writing this blog post. Each week we meet in person and do various activities. I can say that one week in this experience is so wonderful and deeply meaningful.
As a sociologist in Ward 6, I notice a few things. First, I am in my mid-50s and I am pretty certain I'm the oldest person in the group. Many of the participants seem to be in their 20s and 30s. There is so much that could be said about this, but I am going to continue to other things.
Second, the formal group encourages us to make the world around us as addictive as our phones were: building new social relationships and community, reclaiming phone-free space in our minds and in our locality, and importantly learning more about DC. While I like turning to locality myself, as a sociologist of globalization, I know that the phone-free movement is global and has been for several years. There is the bipartisan Phone-Free School Movement (called the Smartphone Free Childhood movement in the UK), which likely exists in every country in some way. People go to phone-free tourist locations and with phone-free travel groups. There are phone-free bars. Reddit has a variety of groups, such as r/dumbphones and r/nosurf. This is a global movement to create other pathways and other ways of interacting outside corporate-Smartphone worlds. How might we remember the globalness we had back in the 1980s and early 1990s (and much earlier too) before cell phones (see my discussion about DC here)?
Third, so many people say that AI is inevitable and the expansion of Smartphones use is inevitable. Sociologists really get upset when people say something is inevitable. People make things seem inevitable or commonsense or natural. Sociologists also get interested when people say something is inevitable because this phenomenon and the social investment in it are then in fact fascinating and worth investigating and thinking about. And as I said above, there are global movements making other worlds.
Just my first sociological thoughts on this from Ward 6.
