Smartphones have revolutionalised the way society is experienced, spatialized and performed. Never before in human history has information been shared so quickly and freely across the globe and within local and international communities.
The way we work has shifted, sped up by the pandemic, and engrained into the fabric of society, with work from home, remote learning and online team organisers taking a newly dominant role.
Here at Oxford, we earnt our place through academics alone, with no social profile needed to help secure our place. But here at Oxford is where that path comes to an abrupt end. How do we transition from academic excellence into real-world success stories? Sure, some will see academia as the end goal, but the vast majority of us see Oxford only as a stepping stone to going out and making a productive difference in the World.
When we think of the most successful University-aged figures in the World, Greta Thunberg, and Malala Yousafi, are some activists that come to mind, yet the vast majority are new influencers and celebrities like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, TikTok’s Charlie D’amelio and Millie Bobbie Brown. Sure, it does derive from how you determine success, but having a celebrity platform today is vital to many roles, including philanthropic ones, that were more accessible in the past. For these roles having a presence on social media is vital, none the more so for anything political or involving civil society.
Jobs like journalism, business, media, investment, diplomacy, and more are all dependent on networks whose growth is fostered through social media. Whether it be Twitter for journalists or LinkedIn for business the impossibility of switching off is very real. Add to this the hundreds of daily emails. Messages and reminders once only received in person during work hours are now inseparable from our being with mobile phones glued to our hips.
But it’s not just in the workplace that devices have changed our world. Social media has become the main source of entertainment for countless young people. Gone are the days of playing with toys, in are the smartphone apps and screens. This revolution occurred during our childhoods – while I may have had my first phone at 12, many today are getting devices much younger – think 5 years old for iPads.
There’s an interesting psychology around phones that is alarming. In 2021 the average UK adult spent 4 hours on their phone. Half of all Americans agree with the following statement: “I can’t imagine a life without my phone”. Shockingly, nearly 1 out of every 10 American checks their phone during sex.
Catherine Price’s book ‘How to break up with your phone in 30 days’ is a great starting point for combatting this issue of modernity.
She outlines how our phones are designed to addict us with feedback. So the argument goes, if the brain learns that checking your phone usually results in a reward and subsequent dopamine release, the brain wants to check it more often. Dopamine is central to motivation and causes excitement. To captivate attention social media apps rely on intermittent reinforcements which always means new and surprising content shows up on your feed. They also harness FOMO to ensure we feel the need to be constantly updated. And tap into our human need to be loved, by making us want to be more popular on social media.
Social media is using the population as free labour, collecting our data after we produce it for free and then bombarding us with paid advertising that further generates revenue. We gain nothing but a shorter attention span. By interfering with our short-term memory, we are at risk of forgetting most of life’s experiences and being unable to fully experience the present moment.
So the effects are explicit, but how to balance this knowledge whilst simultaneously growing a career, maintaining a social life, and unlearning the habits of social media all while resisting the urge for constant phone-checking? Sounds pretty difficult, right?
Price maintains that you can improve your concentration, rebuild your attention span and improve your memory. The first step through mindfulness is to be more present. Then the next step is the ‘technology triage’ to understand your personal usage and take action. Price recommends deleting social media apps entirely and only accessing them on a laptop or iPad. However, what social media has done so well is integrate forms of communication within an entertainment app – think Snapchat, which focuses on communication, but has Stories, Tiles and Reels all waiting to draw you in – Instagram is the same.
Price then suggests coming back to real life and taking up a hobby or past-time you never had the time to do and taking up a sport. All this by week 1?
Week 2 focuses on changing habits like notifications, deleting apps that steal your time and changing where you charge your phone. Setting no-phone boundary zones means a complete detachment. And one that many of us in Oxford are guilty of: ‘phubbing’. This is when you interact with your phone whilst in an active social engagement.
Week 3 focuses on reclaiming your brain through mindfulness practice, an evermore conventional way of combating the freefall of time in the current age. This week concludes with a trial separation of 24 hours from your phone.
The final Week 4 includes a ‘Phast’ when the phone is turned off at particular times and events, and a ‘digital sabbath’ with phone-free weekends.
That all sounds lovely and convincing when on paper, but how feasible is it? I fear that in this modern age we have passed a threshold from which there is no return at an individual level. To isolate oneself digitally means to disadvantage oneself. Taking back control from social media and smartphones will require a concerted effort, but one that is unlikely to materialise.
So the key then is finding a balance. Resisting the TikToks and Instagram apps of the World. This is more straightforward. I for one have stopped scrolling Instagram feeds and limited screen time for my apps but I still find myself on my phone. Wherever one time-wasting app is curtailed, another develops.
Over the vacation, I will try the 30-day plan, and see how successful it really is. Will you?
Image credit: Marko Verch/CC BY 2.0 via Flickr
Dahl in the Dock; or, the publishing industry and its consequences
“Don’t you ever stop reading?” complains Mr Wormwood to his daughter in Roald Dahl’s much-loved novel Matilda. Snatching the book from her hands—a novel by Steinbeck—he asks her: “What is this trash?” And in spite of her insistence on the work’s merits, it’s clear that he has already made up his mind: “Filth. […] If it’s by an American it’s certain to be filth. That’s all they write about.” The scene reaches a climax as an enraged Mr Wormwood rends the volume’s leaves from its spine: thus prejudice and philistinism conspire to cut Matilda’s long story short.
Dahl’s characters are invariably hyperbolic. Matilda’s negligent parents, James’ ill-proportioned aunts and The Twits all share a quality of fairy-tale villainy, where evil rears its head without subtlety and is painted in grotesque colours that evoke overheated childhood imagining. It is thus justly presumed that the critique forwarded by Dahl in Mr Wormwood’s personage—led to destroy a book out of ignorance—was, at the time of composition, wholly of the author’s invention. But even his instinct for the outlandish has proven to be no match for the excesses of the 2023 activist class. Mr Wormwood, whether he knew it or not, was but a fictive forbear of the modern publisher, who, armed only with Tipp-Ex and a perverse disregard of authorial authority, blots blithely at the literature sworn to his protection.
The facts of the case have by now been much discussed. It began with an investigation by The Telegraph, bringing to light hundreds of changes made in Puffin’s latest editions of Dahl’s novels. These omissions, reformulations, gender-neuterings and wholesale reversals of meaning constitute a great slew of edits, whose professed intention—per a brief introductory note—is to “ensure that [the novels] can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” To take one example: no longer is the larger-than-life Augustus Gloop “deaf to everything except the call of his enormous stomach”; rather, he is simply “ignoring everything”. No longer do the Oompa-Loompas versify his fate as a “pig” who will “gorge and guzzle, feed and feast”; he is merely characterised as ‘vile’—an adjective which appeals to sensitivity readers in its useful ambiguity that makes no reference to weight. Elsewhere, it is difficult even to identify the cause of offence: faces are no longer “white with horror” but rather “agog”; and “crazy with frustration” is now rendered as “wild with frustration”—apparently relegating ‘crazy’ to a mental health-related slur. Predictably, the scalpel taken to Dahl—wielded by a hand far less skilled than that of the author himself—has left the text in a sorry state of mutilation.
But this time, the woke brigade wasn’t going to get away with it. Galvanized by The Telegraph and perhaps spurred on by glazed memories of pram-borne pheasants, pigtail-flung pupils and giant peaches, the adults in the room got talking. Sir Salman Rushdie—the cancelled author par excellence, who at one time had an entire Middle Eastern state hankering for his hanging—condemned Puffin for “absurd censorship”. David Mitchell, the stalwart humourist of the Guardianista set, made the high-status, anti-capitalist argument for opposing the edits—which to his credit is not unconvincing. In what was presumably a desperate act of damage control, Puffin promised to publish the original texts alongside their updated cousins, an announcement largely drowned out by the thunder of Britons fulminating against the evils of the anti-Dahl axis in pubs across the country. This is no mere exaggeration: I had politically disengaged friends roused to anger over what was seen as an assault on their childhood culture. And outrage is a sentiment Dahl would have shared: he once warned that if his posthumous editors should change so much as a comma, he would—from the grave—“send along the ‘enormous crocodile’ to gobble them up.” It must be conceded that a crocodile of such proportions would make short work of a puffin.
But perhaps it’s case closed? Compromise achieved? The pre-operative texts are, after all, now bound for the printing press. Sadly, critics who close the book on this affair so readily fail to see its broader significance. Because it was not long ago that works of literature were treated with a kind of reverence, a protestant-adjacent radicalism that emphasised the inviolable text. The author was a kind of sacred idea, not wholly accessible to the reader, but nonetheless the spirit that gave unity to any written work; if possible, every pen mark or key-stroke was to be preserved in amber. As much became evident to me when studying Of Mice and Men early in secondary school, where liberal teachers, from a department more keyed into the social implications of their work than any other, suddenly had students read aloud the most offensive passages of that book. The offence was of course discussed, analysed and contextualised—but never omitted. It was part of the book, and that was that. Of course, there are differences between what is discussed in a classroom of twelve-year-olds, and what is given to the child at the age of eight for personal reading. But the point stands: better surely to let helicopter parents ban Dahl to protect their fledglings from the possibility of offence, than to rob the whole corpus of its authenticity. Once a precedent for edits is established, the books will, one imagines, enter a state of perpetual flux, until eventually—like a latter-day Ship of Theseus—there will be no signifier of the past society in them, no relic that might (Heaven forfend) summon up traumatic visions of the old ways.
Thus the tyranny of the now seems to exert an irresistible gravitational pull. Modern editors aim to unanchor texts from their historical moorage—crudely replacing, for example, a reference in the Witches to women working as secretaries with a new sentence about their employment as ‘top scientists. We are left with Frankenstein texts whose fabric remains inalterably baked into the culture of their time and place, adorned with the limbs and digits of a different era, as incongruous as those of a different species.
The sensitivity reader has fired a warning shot. So deludedly emboldened to so crudely desiccate the writings of an author so recently passed—they have placed their cards on the table. We can be certain that they will befoul all the more readily older texts whose values are even further from those of the current moral order. And it’s a process the authorities abet: just last month, in a Prevent research document, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis numbered among an illustrious company with the dubious honour of being listed as red flags for white supremacist terror. These trends seem likely to worsen as a younger generation—for whom the cardinal sin is prejudice—come to dominate publishing and government alike. To the book-lover there is only one course of action available: buy the books you love, and stow them away under your mattress. At least then the greatest risk of desecration comes from a disgruntled Mr Wormwood-character, whom you can fight off with your hands, and not a great faceless publisher of which you know nothing and in the face of which you are powerless.