Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Beating your smartphone addiction with socks

A shocking thing happened here recently, and it wasn't the fact that I finally finished the socks I was knitting myself for Christmas:


Nope.  Here's what is stranger than that: I was reading a magazine article and, glancing at an accompanying photograph that was a bit too small to make out properly, I reached out with my thumb and forefinger and attempted to enlarge it.  ON PAPER.

All joking aside, that scares me, and in spite of trying to be mindful of the format I am using when reading, it's happened twice more.  I can't pretend now that my brain hasn't been rewired to think that I can alter print reality with a touch.  Because it has.


Digression for boring science stuff:

The scary things you read about smartphones are much more scary than that, but they come down to the same thing - our brains are being rewired by the screens we use.  Teenagers whose brains are still developing, and who use social media, are getting a rush from Likes, and it's affecting their moods and the choices they make about what to post online.  Well, I can relate to that, because even at Ravelry or on my humble blog here, a friendly comment or a heart gives you a nice feeling, not unlike getting a piece of physical mail from an actual person in the mailbox attached to your street address.  It's not compelling enough to make me push myself beyond my abilities to post constantly (obviously!  I am so dropping the ball on my plan to post every weekday again.)  But I can absolutely attest to the power of it.

Becoming hooked on the rush you get from likes, and dreading the negative feelings you get from the reverse, means you are staring at a screen for a long time every day, and apart from anything else, that can't be good for a person's eyes.  It's also different from the neurological benefits of human touch and face to face socializing.

And obviously: if you're reading this, you already know all that because you're crafty!  Even if you use Facebook and Instagram, you probably knit in a group once in a while, and you're touching fiber and fabrics.  Like me you probably feel pretty safe from the changes smartphones are creating in our fellow humans, assuming you have a smartphone (and I have lots of friends who don't, so I make no assumptions here.)

But think about it.  I swore off Facebook years ago and never got around to making an Instagram account, and can't even be bothered with Twitter because what do I have to say that's so interesting, and also brief? and yet: I am still trying to make a photograph bigger while reading print media.



And now, back to the practical:

Pete gave me a Smartphone just before we started our home renovation project, and I learned to use it constantly because there was so much happening that needed to be dealt with immediately.  It was such a help to be able to search online, take photographs, send photographs, text, and whip off an email.

Then I discovered the fun things:

Reading books on a Kindle, even on my tiny phone, meant I could knit at the same time!

Subscriptions to the digital editions of The Washington Post and The New York Times mean I get to read well-written nonfiction all day long.  And access fabulous recipes too (thank you New York Times, especially for the lemon linguine.)

On the subway, I get to choose between knitting, reading on my Kindle app, or playing spider solitaire.

I can effortlessly check the weather forecast for outside my door, at my cottage, and where all my far-flung friends live.

I can play music and audiobooks, saving shelf space for our stereo system which we haven't even unpacked yet.  In fact I think it might still be in storage and will probably stay there, at this rate.

Watching a movie, I can look up online the name of the actor who I totally recognize but can't quite place.

Now that I can store my patterns as .pdfs on it, I don't need to print or carry paper.

When traveling, I don't need to pack a map.  Or a guidebook.

and so on.  It all adds up, and so does my pile of New Yorkers, which I used to devour along with every meal at my table.  (we are probably the only family I know who always eats together but saves all the chats for every minute we are away from it.  Mealtime is reading time!)

Can you imagine how many more things I'd use it for, if I did social media??


Since we've been back in our house and the last of the renovations have paused till the weather warms up again, I have been struggling to get back into my routines - posting here regularly, photographing finished knits and posting them to Ravelry, sewing the drapes I still need to hang - and over the weekend it hit me:

it's my smartphone. 

I am on that thing so much, my hands and eyes and mind are never free for anything else. 

So now, I'm trying to separate myself from my darling device.  It's not just a question of plugging it in to charge in a different room from where I am, though that does seem to help.  I am trying to allocate more time for watercolour painting.  More time out walking (but not texting at every stop light.)  More time cooking from a recipe I wrote out by hand on a card - I have enough pens I love to write with, after all. More time with my first love, sitting on the sofa and knitting while watching some fabulous old movie.

And more time for writing fiction, which this post is keeping me from doing, so I'll end here.  Except to ask:

Do you think you're on a smart device too much?  And if so, what do you do to stay off it?

(also: the socks are mostly hand-dyed, fingering weight alpaca.  CRAZY supersoft.  the blue stripes are a DK weight superwash wool I thought looked nice with it.  isn't it great to figure out ways to combine totally different weights of yarn without throwing off the fit?)





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