Digitally Dumb? Why I Refuse to Buy a Smart Phone

Okay I’ll get it out of the way. I don’t have  a smart phone. There I’ve said it. My penance is the embarrassment I feel admitting it, and that’s plenty.
 

Lacking a smart phone is not just a minor social fail, like being a teetotaller, not having a partner, or not being able to drive (hey at least I can drive). It is a failure far more drastic, marking you as fundamentally irrelevant to modern culture.

If you don’t have a car, you’re saving the environment. If you’re a renter, you can drop everything and hike through Mongolia for a  few years without worrying whether the tenants are trashing your place. If you don’t have a smart phone you’re just pathetic – unless you’re over seventy and then you’re excused.

A dumb mobile phone is outdated while totally lacking vintage charm. While smaller than a smart phone, it manages to be the telecommunications equivalent of those big clunky computer monitors. Even checking it is embarrassing because you can only be checking two things: text messages and the time. Better not to take it out at all.

Nor does it work as a badge of honour that marks me as a struggling garret-dwelling artistic type. Many homeless people have smart phones, and good on them, as without a stable base it’s their only way of being plugged in.

I like to think not having a smart phone is a form of rebellion. But no-one cares about my tragic mid-life refusal to conform. No-one cares about anything. They are too busy looking at those tiny screens. While they all seem terribly serious and absorbed, everyone knows that everyone else is playing Temple Run, checking out potential sexual partners on Tinder or Grindr, or scrolling their friends’ selfies on SnapChat.

There’s been plenty of hand wringing about how the once-collective public space has been parcelled into thousands of tiny little mind spaces – why can’t iPhones be we-Phones? Being in a crowd feels weird these days, as if everything’s a bit virtual because the people around you are in parallel worlds unknown to you. They’re all off on their own unique trajectory (too often unfortunately into the path of oncoming traffic if the stats can be trusted).

You notice this lack much more when you don’t have your own personal brain extension to retreat to. You notice and you miss the collective ‘we’ even though that might be the most fragile of webs, like three people waiting for a train at a lonely suburban station.  You feel the mental absence of those around you and you want to draw them back into the vaguest of curiosities about who you are.

That public loss is why, when bus or train drivers introduce themselves over their microphones and make corny jokes, everyone seems to enjoy it. One driver did this on the Gardenvale line going into the city on an overcast Sunday afternoon. As soon as his friendly ocker tones ruptured the dull anonymity of the carriage it felt like being on a country train going to some mystery location. ‘We’re expecting to reach our destination,’ he told us, ‘when the train reaches Flinders Street. Have a lovely trip.’ He was never going to get a gig on Saturday Night Live, but he made the whole carriage grin. For a few short minutes we were as one.

Smart phones don’t always successfully keep their owners plugged in. I’ve made the mistake of assuming that my smart phone owning friends would be reading their emails twenty-four hours a day. I’ve cancelled things at the last minute only to receive desperate calls that have put decades-long friendships at risk (‘I’ve just spent half an hour riding here from Collingwood – where the hell are you?’)

Then again I benefit from the giant well of knowledge that is other people’s smart phones. Walking through North Melbourne one day and hopelessly lost, I asked a labourer at a building site for directions, and he got out his iPhone. You don’t really need your own when there are others’ to fall back on.

I already spend too long in front of computer screens as a freelance writer and editor. I’m not exactly deprived of Jack Russell crosses obligingly teaching babies how to crawl, or elephants shedding tears when freed from decades in chains. I even have a PVR where I can store and watch as much television trash as I want. I don’t need yet another screen.

It’s just so uncool not to have a smart phone. But contrarian that I am, the more uncool it is the more stubbornly I’ll hold out against the cultural pressure, like someone who only gets away with not vaccinating their kids because most other parents do. One day, they’ll probably be a legal requirement. Till then, I’ll remain a digital dag.

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My new non-human companions

A birdie

For about the last three weeks, almost every day, a plain brown bird, probably a female common blackbird, has been tapping on my bathroom window intermittently throughout the day, fluttering away when I rush to intercept her. I’ve christened her Mabel.

There’s a wisteria against the back wall of the house, and I thought for a while Mabel was trying to pull off wisteria stems to build a nest. But now I don’t think so. I’ve learned to creep up to the bathroom door and peer at it in the mirror on the right-hand wall, which is at right angles to the wall with the window, and when I do this I can see Mabel knocking on the glass with her beak.

The insistence of this task suggests that she’s worked out that the glass is a genuine substance, not mere air as those unfortunate birds who knock into windows think it is, and has decided that if she knocks for long enough and hard enough she can penetrate it.

No matter how quiet I am, Mabel knows when I creep up, and she stops her tapping and stares at my image in the mirror with trepidation. When I creep quietly through the door to look at her square on, she flaps away.

I glimpse before she flutters away a look of curiosity and interest on her face. She seems fascinated by the sheltered foreign world behind the glass, even eager to enter it – perhaps it seems like an incredibly safe and obvious place to build a nest? On one morning recently she’d brought what was probably her mate along, a much darker blackbird, to observe her efforts.

Why this one bird? Why is she so fascinated by the glass? Why don’t other birds of the same species act this way? Is Mabel dumber than her peers or more intelligent? If more intelligent, could she breed a series of superbirds that might become more intelligent still?

But if she seeks the strange new world she glimpses in the shadows behind the glass, why doesn’t she fear it, knowing that a huge human lurks behind it?

She’s tapping much less often now, down from her maximum of perhaps four or five tries a day, but she still hasn’t given up. On one morning she started early, while I was still in bed, and I even thought I heard her a few nights ago, but peering through the darkened window to see if she was still there was futile.

My writerly brain is always trying to find a symbolic or spiritual meaning when there is none. Does Mabel’s urgent tapping mirror my own attempts to rejoin the human race? Is that also a futile task? Or is she a spirit in human form trying to convey some vital message from the other side?

More importantly, how do I explain the scratches on the window to my landlords?

A computer

I’ve just bought a new computer and the whole thing cost me a lot more than I was expecting to pay – almost a thousand dollars more, if you count the $240 I spent for the nice computer man to come and set it up for me. This decision felt incredibly indulgent at the time – the technician who fixed my computer last time quoted only $70 to install the new software and copy the files over, but he would only do it at his shopfront.

Given the things that went wrong with the set-up (my old printer incompatible with Windows 7; the surge protection power board activating the safety switch for the circuit, causing the electricity on the circuit to turn off) I’m just relieved I chose the more expensive route. I thought I was pandering to my chronic fear of things not going right but it turned out to be a necessity; simply having these problems occurring with someone there to comment on and diagnose them was important. I bought a new cheapo surge protection board, and I’m adjusting to my dad’s old desk jet printer, while he’s been promised my seven-year-old HP laser printer as he’s on an earlier version of Windows.

It infuriated me that my old printer was still going strong but was being forced into unnecessary obsolescence – HP have created some Windows-compatible drivers for some of their older models, but not this one, and I was told that the older the model the less likely they are to do so in future if they haven’t already. I mean no offence to users of desk jets, my dad included, but it feels like going back in time after a laser printer! I’ll buy a new laser printer at some stage, but HP has lost my vote for good.

This is the first time I’ve bought a new computer in five-and-a-half years and I’m noticing a similar situation to the one that occurred last time. I’ve tried to avoid unnecessary bells and whistles (no blueray DVD player for me) but I have the same sense I did last time of a whole lot of new features on the standard programs, many of which might be helpful but that I’ll probably never get around to finding out about, as if an ideal technological life (that I’d paid for) were passing me by.

I’ve also been keeping Norton busy with some glitches while using its anti-virus program with Explorer, and was in danger of becoming a nuisance caller. Luckily I’ve cleverly worked out that I can easily test if the anti-virus program is to blame just by turning it off temporarily. And simply observing as the Norton techies temporarily take over my computer and do their swift and magic checks with their invisible hands has been both weird and instructive. Through sheer necessity they seem to know far more about the glitches that Explorer can cause than Microsoft ever will.

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