The above photo is from a project called Removed, by Eric Pickersgill Studio. The series captures reenactments of scenes we see every day: in moments both intimate and mundane, private and social, we stare at phones in our hands. By removing the devices, the behavior looks isolating, vacant. But it also makes evident how integrated phones have become, not just in our lives but in our physical form. As the artist explains: “The joining of people to devices has been rapid and unalterable…personal devices are shifting behaviors while simultaneously blending into the landscape by taking form as being one with the body. This phantom limb is used as a way of signaling busyness and unapproachability to strangers while existing as an addictive force that promotes the splitting of attention between those who are physically with you and those who are not.”
The underlying hypothesis of Analog is that if a smartphone is stripped of its addictive properties, stripped down to its basic utilities, say to the phone, notes, and clock functions, for example, then people will naturally and voluntarily put them down. What keeps us staring at the phone is the constant information flow, the easy and infinite dopamine hits, the never ending notifications that there’s something to see. If we could regularly and automatically turn all that digital volume down, we’d just as regularly and automatically put our phones down.
I think that’s true. Assuming it is, what then? What will fill the blank space in our hands that the distraction machine used to inhabit? What are we then starting at?
For starters, we could reclaim our ability to pay attention, to live without staring at a distraction machine. As Jenny Odell writes in How to Do Nothing, "What is needed, then, is not a 'once-and-for-all' type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity."
Here is one suggestion on how to do that, from Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus. Pick up a “deliberately slow practice”. Obvious examples are yoga and meditation, but I would think reading a book or taking a walk fall in this category. As Hari writes, “When you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature – and you build that into your daily life – you begin to train your attention and focus… Slowness nurtures attention.”