Last night before I even got into bed I checked my phone; I
had received a tweet. I replied. I thought I’d just check the news feed to see
what’s going down. After that, I thought
I’d check Tumblr. Nope, nothing
there. Since I was at my phone I felt
there was no harm in checking Facebook too.
Just a quick look, y’know. Thirty
minutes and a lot of Facebook stalking later, I decide to charge my phone.
I read my book quite a while. I got up late that morning so I know I’m not
going to be ready to sleep for a bit so it’s not till about 1am that I abandon
the book and go to turn off the light.
Before I do, however, I wonder if I should just check what is happening
on the blogosphere of Tumblr, again, just the once. I do. I
then check Facebook and last of all Twitter.
I settle down to sleep. At 1:30am
I hear a noise from my phone which means I’ve got an email. I know it’s probably Groupon. I just check to make sure. It’s Groupon.
I settle down to sleep again.
At 2am I get a noise
from my phone and a vibration this
time. It makes me jump and immediately I
want to see what it is. It’s a message from my cousin, she’s finished her shift
late and she just wanted to know my parents’ email addresses. As soon as I start reading it, I feel a bit
stupid. Why am I bothering to let these
little things stop me from going to sleep.
Surely I can last just 8 hours without looking at my phone to see what’s
going on in the world? Plus I am aware
that Facebook has a setting which now shows when and at what time a message has
been read by the recipient. No sooner
have I finished reading, I get a message back from my cousin, “Why are you
awake?!” and I feel like I’ve been caught in the act. Caught red handed obsessing over Facebook
notifications, tweets, retweets and ‘favourites’. There’s obviously nothing wrong with not being
able to sleep. But there is a certain
ridiculousness in feeling a compulsion to check ones phone all the time.
I don’t think I’m the only one who does it either. You name any place where you have to wait
around; doctor’s surgery, bus station, queue for the bank-all of these places
are hot spots for browsing twitter, checking what your pictures look like, seeing
what other’s look like and just general perusing. In fact, there are few places which aren’t
hot spots for this. New technology and the introduction of smart phones means
that general internet browsing on one’s phone is quick, easy and simple.
Being so connected to the whole world wide web at just the
touch of a button is amazing. You can
check train times, see what the weather’s going to be like later that day, book
a holiday, buy your mum a birthday present, check your bank balance, order a
pizza…the list of what you can do is endless.
My fear is that we are so
switched on to the larger world around us, that we find it increasingly hard to
switch off.
I was going to try an experiment where I don’t use my phone
for a whole day. As luck would have it,
I can’t find it this evening at all. It
feels hugely frustrating. For one, it is in this house somewhere, I didn't leave the house with it all day. Secondly, I keep
thinking of all the potential messages and phone calls I'm missing (classic lost
phone anxiety, it always turns out you have two missed calls from your home
phone from when you called it to find out where you’d left it). Maybe now I have lost my phone, I shall regain a
piece of my sanity. I urge you all to
give it a try for a day and tell me how you got on!
