The Cellphone Challenge

RIP

“No man is free who cannot control himself” -Pythagoras

For the past fifteen years, staples of our American society have been disappearing at alarming rates. Products and activities we have enjoyed for decades are slowly being phased out of our way of life. The culprit responsible for their slow fade is something the world has become overly dependent on— the smartphone.

During the chapter on communication, my Anthropology students take an extensive look at how we have become addicted to smartphones. I recognize it in myself and in those all around me. It’s a disturbing trend. Kind of like watching a super slow motion trainwreck. The victims are many. This societal-inflicted norm has made many things vanish, including an assignment I used to look forward to every semester.

Let’s start with familiar products that are fading from existence. Here is a short list and the consequences created by each one’s steady decline in popularity.

1. Basic Calculators: With calculators standard in all smartphones, these guys are dwindling fast. Future generations will never know the joy of discovering the words they can create by turning their calculator upside down, not to mention being deprived of the laughs they can get from their buddies when they show them during math class.

2. Flash Lights: I’m sorry, but the phone versions are just not the same. Old school flashlights never randomly turn on like phone lights do either. The number of times I have been told my flashlight is on is staggering. Plus, kids are being deprived of pretending their flashlights are lightsabers, and that is a crime in itself.

3. Encyclopedias: Stupid Google.

4. Alarm Clocks: These red-numbered, boxed bullhorns could be heard down the street in the dead of winter and were more than dependable. We don’t need all of the fancy alarm tones our phones give us. Windchimes just aren’t a reliable wake up sound compared to the obnoxious blare of an old school alarm clock.

5. Cameras: It’s just too easy now. No effort to drop off film or even download to a computer. I’m sure I am not the only member of Generation X that is grateful cellphones with cameras didn’t exist during our formative years.

New to this ever-expanding list is one of my favorite Anthropology assignments: The Fox Cellphone Challenge. Every semester for the past decade, my students have had the opportunity to attain ten to fifteen bonus points by turning over their cellphones for forty-eight hours. Once their parents signed off on it, the phones were locked in the school safe. At the end of each day, students had to write a one-page reflection on the day without their phone.

Their commentary was hilarious. From being ticked off that they had to check the time on a wall clock, to being unable to find certain places in the city of their birth without their preferred GPS app (Shout out to waze), reading what they wrote was sheer comedy. When forty-eight hours were up, most appeared happier to see their iPhones and Androids than military family members who reunited with loved ones after a six-month deployment.

This year, the final nail in the coffin of the challenge was hammered in when very few students volunteered for this spectacular opportunity at bonus points as there is a minimum participation level of twenty-five percent needed for it to be offered. The reasons given for not participating all support the blatantly obvious theory of smartphone addiction. Forgive this addict if I sound sanctimonious, it certainly takes one to know one.

The reliance we as a society have on our phones has not only been the death knell for many wonderful products and activities, but, more importantly, it has taken away a certain freedom we used to possess. In many respects they control us now. According to the Ancient Greek mathematician Pythagoras, this is tantamount to the wearing of captives’ fetters, and it will likely end when it is a cold day in

-Tommy O’Sionnach

Postscript

After sharing this week’s topic with my sister Julie, she sent me this story. Turns out some professor at Marquette University did a similar exercise with his Data Analytics class in 2019. My niece Annie is the student at the end of the news clip who was late picking up her phone because she overslept. Her unpunctual entrance proved to be the exclamation point that tied the whole story together!