An AI-controlled brooch from the start-up Humane could project messages onto your hand. The product was discontinued. Photo / Chris Velazco, The Washington Post
In 2013, one of Google’s founders said that a computer you wear on your face could help untether us from smartphones.
Mocking a hunched, distracted person staring down at their phone, Sergey Brin asked in a speech whether “this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information”.
By contrast, Brin said that his company’s then-new Google Glass could help free people from “socially isolating” smartphones and their harm to our human connections and bodies.
Google’s internet-connected glasses were essentially dead two years later. What’s persisted are predictions that some new technology – smartwatches, artificial intelligence-controlled wearable devices or a new generation of smart glasses – can make us less phone-obsessed and more present in the real world.
Those predictions have been utterly wrong.
Having more and more capable digital devices seems to have expanded the time we spend online and disconnected from real people and places.
I’m asking us to question the idea that technology can ever liberate us from what we don’t like about our technology use.
And I want to point to school phone bans as a different approach – not by fixing technology’s downsides with more technology but by keeping it out.
When the Apple Watch came out in 2015, Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote about how the device unglued him from his phone.
“It has made me more present. I’m less likely to absentmindedly reach for my phone, or feel compelled to leave it on the table during supper,” he wrote. Geoff lamented that he was spending 4.3 hours a day on his phone back then.
I asked Geoff to check his smartphone usage now. It’s about the same as it was 10 years ago.
Our lives increasingly flow through mobile devices, so standing pat on smartphone screen time might be progress. Geoff said that partly because of his Apple Watch, he can put his phone away without feeling jittery that he’ll miss something important.
It’s an alluring premise: this gadget will make you feel better about your technology use. And for some of you, glancing at a text on an Apple Watch does free you from being sucked into your phone.
But people are distracted by blurts from their smartwatches, too. The devices might just make us antisocial with smaller screens.
As more connected devices become standard, we and the people in our lives have expanded the expectation that we’re always within reach of our jobs, children and the latest appealing app notification, news or outrage cycle.
If we hoped that more technology would make us less online, it’s not working.
Nearly half of American teenagers say that they’re online almost constantly, up from about one-quarter of teens who said the same thing a decade ago, according to the Pew Research Centre.
I’d have no complaints if technology executives pitched their gadgets merely as another useful mobile computer that can do some amazing tasks better than your phone, such as translating the language of a person speaking in front of you.
But as with Brin, many executives tend to say their devices can be balms for cultural and social disconnection.
“The promise of glasses is to preserve the sense of presence that you have when you’re with other people,” Mark Zuckerberg said last week as he introduced Meta’s latest smart glasses.
“I think that we’ve lost it a little bit with phones, and we have the opportunity to get it back with glasses.”
To control the new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, you pinch and swipe your fingers while wearing a special wristband. Soon you’ll be able to type by tracing letters on your leg. Does tapping out a text under the dinner table “preserve the sense of presence”?
Meta and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Around the country, Americans are trying something different to tackle technology-related distractions and disconnection.
They’re crafting restrictions on children’s use of phones in school.
School phone bans are contentious and still too new to make sweeping conclusions about their effects. Some early research and family experiences seem promising.
Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and author whose specialties include technology addiction, has long said that individuals alone cannot fix what we don’t like about technology.
Companies, social institutions, governments and schools all have a responsibility to help reset norms about technology use.
“The evidence is strong that banning smartphones in schools - and I mean really banning them, bell-to-bell, not leaving it up to teacher discretion and enforcement, or banning them in class but keeping them for everything else - improves social, emotional, and physical wellbeing,” Lembke wrote in an email.
It’s hard to imagine school phone bans translating broadly into the adult world.
What’s novel is that we didn’t shrug off the perceived harms of technology or hoped for some magical technology fix.
Instead, we’ve collectively opted to try a low-tech solution.
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