In a few days, I will own my first smart phone. I am 19 years old. Considering that the average age for a child to get his or her first smartphone is around 10 years old, I’m somewhat of an anomaly. For the last four years, I’ve owned and gladly used a good ole dumb phone — the kind with a slide-out keyboard and battery that pops out whenever you drop it or throw it too hard. Whenever I mention to someone that I don’t have a smartphone, I always get strange looks. Some people (mostly adults) say that they envy me and wish they could go back to a simpler mobile device. Most friends my age respect my decision but point out everything that I’m missing out on. One of my professors asked me if my lack of a smartphone was based on some moral high ground.
For a long time, I didn’t think twice about my small, red phone that I had inherited from my mom. It worked well for texting and calling, and it even survived a fall from a roof with only a few minor scratches. Then I began to notice how smartphones create a world all to themselves — a kind of club or clique connected through the all-pervasive tendrils of the web and centered around Snapchat and Instagram. On bus rides home from soccer games, my teammates would huddle around their phone screens, making silly faces for selfies and laughing together. I would smile at their antics and look out the window. More and more people around me looked down at their phones, and I looked up and out at the world around me. And I realized that I didn’t want a smartphone. The internet on my laptop is enough of a distraction without a portable device to make entertainment and information constantly available. I want to be awake, to live fully and presently in each moment. I want to learn from and listen to the trees and air and people around me, not watch the semblance of life on a screen. And so I decided I didn’t want a smartphone.
Perhaps it was something of a moral high ground, an act of rebellion against culture, a tie to the old-fashioned ways and values which are so dear to me. Whatever the case, I didn’t consider changing my mind until a few months ago. I still hold by my previous beliefs about the dangers and distractions of smartphones. I don’t think they are evil — just one of those tools that have as much capacity for harm as for help. What I’ve realized, however, is that my dumb phone is so behind technologically that it no longer works well for communicating with smartphones. Group text messages and pictures clog up its memory, it works slower everyday, and sometimes I won’t even be able to receive certain messages for whatever reason. In short, my ideals have to bend to practicality.
We’ll see how my views change once I actually own a smartphone. I hope that I will be able to be self-disciplined and to use it as little as possible. I want to be able to go hours without looking at my phone as I do now. In the end, to have or not have a smartphone is not the point. To live vibrantly, intentionally, completely — this should be our aim and desire. Whether or not a smartphone enables you to do that is a matter of individual wisdom and prudence.
