Last month, while at the Falmer Bar Pub Quiz with The Badger, one of the questions asked those participating to guess what the average phone screen time was. The room was awash with murmurings of different selections of hours and minutes, as I turned to my partner and said, ‘I can’t imagine it will be less than six hours, that’s around my average!’ I was, of course, wrong. I found myself genuinely astounded that the answer was only four and a half hours. What am I doing for six whole hours? And is it all superfluous, or am I really reliant on my phone for all that time?
This begs a wider question: when did our phones become oh-so-significant? It’s hard for me to imagine a life where I can go even one day without checking my phone. I could do it when I was a child, before I had one, so why can’t I now? The simple answer is that, slowly, every task has become possible on one’s smartphone.
Not only do I use my phone for the simple things, texting, calling, and a little bit of doomscrolling, but I also use my phone to get work easily. I can request a shift in two clicks and apply for any job I fancy from one of the several applications I have installed with that exact goal in mind. This concentration of functions on a single device goes beyond job-seeking; I have even started taking notes on it in class if I can’t be bothered to bring my computer. Every item I need to study at university can be replaced by something on my phone.
But is this actually something that should be viewed negatively? Maybe in my case, I feel as if I am becoming reliant or attached to my phone, but it should be taken on a case-by-case basis. For example, a student who is unable to afford a computer or replace one that has broken, having the ability to use their smartphone to stay up to date with their studies is a significant positive and shows how helpful technological developments can be. This can make one’s screentime look worse than it actually is, but does that mean it’s still okay to be looking at your phone for that long each day? For me, no.
I see it as a slippery slope. Before that overused phrase leads you to turn the page, I mean it in the sense that allowing myself to use my phone for an hour each day because I’m studying, can make me excuse using it for another hour, later in the day, just for the sake of it. I joked earlier about a ‘little bit of doomscrolling’, but from talking to my peers, I am certainly not the only one who finds ‘phone time’, whether in the morning before getting up, before going to bed at night, or both, to be an essential part of their daily routine. I find myself waking up at eight in the morning with the aim of being productive, but sometimes not leaving my bed until as late as ten, just because I had lost track of how far I had sunk into the rubbish on my phone.
I wish there were a world where I could throw my phone out the window or off a cliff and never look back, but there isn’t. This is partly because I would inevitably have to spend a ridiculous amount of money replacing it, but mainly because we now live in a society that is so heavily reliant on the existence and versatility of mobile phones. For now, I will have to settle for the little things, the small goals to break my patterns, which I will likely fail to achieve, but hopefully one day I can put my phone down, and for good.
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