Used with consideration, smartphones can deepen our connection to the present
In “The Enormous Radio”, John Cheever’s noted short story from 1947, a Manhattan couple purchases the eponymous appliance to replace a malfunctioning model. They soon find that it plays more than music – it picks up their neighbours’ conversations and taps into the undercurrent of the world. They eventually have it fixed but psychic damage remains.
My iPhone also seems to transmit the unending babble of the world. Though unlike Cheever’s radio, it is with me all the time – in a sense, it is me. “The smartphone has become a repository of the self,” writes media scholar Nicholas Carr, “recording and dispensing the words, sounds and images that define what we think, what we experience and who we are.” Some three-and-a-half hours of my daily attention, according to Apple’s Screen Time function, is devoted to my iPhone (to be fair, this does include newspaper apps and Strava). I’ve always thought of this as deeply problematic but lately I’ve been trying to reframe the issue and consider what the iPhone – used “mindfully” – gives me.
I was sitting on my back porch recently, reading magazines and enjoying a warm spring. The very picture of analogue pleasure. Suddenly, I heard an unusual call from out of the cacophony of house sparrows and gray catbirds. I reached for my phone and opened Merlin, the bird-identification app produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which immediately flagged it as a green heron. After some searching, I spotted said heron – a migratory traveller in my backyard – atop a cypress tree.
Here the device’s sensitive microphone, precise geolocation and access to infinite information helped me to unlock a layer of the world that I might’ve missed. Carr reminds us that information is not necessarily knowledge. But the event prompted a small voyage of discovery and I was soon reading up on what The Sibley Guide to Birds describes as a “solitary, secretive” species.
Even as I neuter the phone in some respects – barring notifications, removing enervating apps such as X – I find myself using it as a very specific tool, often in unexpected places: next to my trowel and secateurs, my most valued gardening tool is crowdsourced plant-identification app PlantNet. At the airport, Flighty provides granular information about my plane while I listen to airfield crosstalk on LiveATC and check traffic movements with FlightRadar24. For all its bad publicity – largely read and shared on the device itself – the phone, in moments such as these, is not taking us out of the moment. Rather, it’s intensifying our sense of presence. Let’s have more of that.
Vanderbilt is a regular Monocle contributor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.
