First Year w/a Smartphone: WTF Happened?! Part 1

jennislay (49)in #social • 5 years ago (edited)

Part 1: Me Before Meta-technology

_{Meta-tech being digital tools that allow us to digitally echo our own actions & expose our own narratives to broad audiences.}

I'm here to tell the story of my first year with a smartphone, 2017, and particularly how my thinking has evolved since choosing to engage in modern technology. But before we get into all that, it's important you know where these decisions were coming from. Context!

_{Me living my hermit life pre-2017. (Photo Credit Masha Charnay via Vocativ.com - This is actually a Russian Hermit.)}

Why no Smartphone until 2017?

I chose to steer clear of smartphone technology until last year for specific reasons.
There are plenty of people willing to put narratives into your head for you - but only you can write your OWN narrative. My own narrative was feeble and in formation, and I needed to focus on that internally, without pressuring myself to broadcast my life using meta-tech.

Simply put, I rejected the technological intrusion into my life. I didn’t WANT to be accessible, or seen, or in any kind of situation that would render me socially responsible. Like a shy sponge, I slithered around soaking up information & forming my identity... WITHOUT a smartphone. (Thank gawd!)

Looking around & seeing what smartphone technology was doing to everyone, how much time the people I loved were spending just staring at stupid little screens, was somewhat surreal and definitely a deterrent. Societal patterns shifted noticeably within just a few years, and I was - and still am - skeptical of the change.

For those reasons, I opted out of that reality for myself. "Who gives a fuck about what I do, and why would I give a fuck about what others do?" Was a big part of my mindset. I didn’t feel willing to share or valuable enough to share.

This was also a stupidly brilliant method of shirking responsibility. By staying away from my computer and having a “dumb” phone, I genuinely DIDN’T receive emails & messages - and therefore, I [mostly] didn’t feel guilty about not answering them. I carefully managed to avoid engaging with most everyone except a few people on my text list, my closest relatives, and people I saw directly in person. I was a certified hermit, and proud of it!

Why I FINALLY decided to get a Smartphone & Engage

I began to feel...full. Full of information. Like it was pouring out of me towards all sorts of random people - cashiers, uninterested family members, boyfriends - none of whom seemed to absorb or care about the fascinating knowledge I was trying to bring them. This was frustrating; there were so many juicy, radical, life-changing ideas brimming with possibility now inside my brain, and I had almost no audience for them. The first foray into trying to go online was publishing on my own website, but it obviously got almost no traffic (being there was literally nothing to drive people there except talking to me in person).

A realization began bubbling to the surface of my thoughts: In order to actually share what were now relatively rich & helpful intellectual innards, having now composted the raw ingredients of my thoughts, it was time to turn outwards. In the same way I’d enjoyed volunteering for animal rescues, I realized I could HELP by pushing my time & energy outside myself. Except this time I would be helping the whole world! And THE most scalable, potent way to do this, despite my resistance to the idea, was to go Seriously into The Internet. Not just hermit website internet either; the real internet. Social networking, GULP.

And so, a little over one year ago I picked up a Smartphone & took to the ‘net. It’s been a steep learning curve; I needed help just getting & opening the Instagram app at first! Like a Martian explorer landing in unfamiliar terrain, getting my bearings and overcoming disorientation were my main tasks for the first while.

_{Image credit Bill Watterson}
But what got me through it? Is having an ecologically & intellectually information-rich life that’s frankly jam packed with the juicy stuff that makes great content. Now, as we move into the final post-Christmas days of 2018, changes I’ve observed in my patterns, thinking, and decision making have been affected drastically by smartphone technology - specifically, Instagram - and it’s important to document them as I play my own test subject of sorts.