Above: the subject line of an e-mail I sent 20 people in my address book last Thursday night at 9:25 p.m. I imagined my contacts in various and sundry locales as my virtual message landed in their respective inboxes and waited to be read by impatient eyes.
In the e-mail body, I tried to affect the air of the professional journalist, but it didn’t quite work. “Respond to this e-mail as soon as you humanly can!” my message screamed. It then asked my victims to identify whether they’d checked their e-mail on a smart phone. After hitting “Send,” I waited for replies and documented their time stamps.
The point of this admittedly unscientific exercise was this: Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed the growing number of smart phones in the hands of my peers. From BlackBerrys to Droids to the much-hyped and then un-hyped iPhone 4 and beyond, smart phones have become an ever-increasing presence in the lives of undergraduates.
ExactTarget, an e-mail marketing company, estimates that almost 40 percent of college students use smart phones. A study recently conducted at Ball State University puts the percentage closer to 50 percent. At Duke, where the costliness of fads is directly proportional to how quickly they catch on, the proportion is very possibly even greater than that.
Of course, the advent of these newfangled gadgets does wonders for what you can accomplish on the go. Where would we have ended up on a doomed Harris Teeter run if my friend hadn’t GPS-ed us to safety with his Blackberry? How much mental anguish was spared when someone answered a much-contested question via his smart phone? (Apparently, there are 446 bridges in Pittsburgh. A matter of great urgency, for sure.) Wouldn’t it have been nice if I’d read the e-mail about my canceled Wednesday afternoon class before I traipsed all the way to the Bridges House?
Smart phones are incredible, right? Maybe even a “must-have campus accessory,” as Ju’lia Samuels wrote for ABC News blog “Campus Chatter” in June 2009. But despite the marvel of the smart phone, the media backlash has already begun.
We’ve all heard these grievances and dismissed them. Socially, they isolate users and encourage rude behavior. Mentally, they contribute to our shrinking attention spans. Physiologically, the bright light of a smart phone has even been accused of throwing off circadian rhythms and causing sleep deprivation.
But these are small prices to pay for the benefits we draw from having a phone that can do nearly anything we want! And all these criticisms are made begrudgingly while still acknowledging the inherent helpfulness of what smart phones offer: They make our lives easier, expediting otherwise tedious tasks.
Is that even true though? Or is the complete opposite case in fact the reality of our tech-crazed lives?
Pretend you’re an English major, and suppose that in this text, “smart phones” are symbolic of all the technologically astounding feats of the last half-decade designed to make our day-to-day activities more convenient. This includes still oft-discussed developments (Facebook Places, iTunes Ping, Google Instant) and other innovations no one considers novel anymore (Facebook, iTunes, Google—the platforms on which these new services expanded).
Think about how much time these advances have freed up in your lives. Consider just how stress-free the person compulsively checking his e-mail next to you on the C1 actually seems. Estimate how many minutes (hours?) per day you spend scrolling through e-mails and jumping at Facebook notifications when you should have been buckling down with a textbook.
To me, it appears much more plausible that, rather than simplifying our busy schedules and freeing up time, technology is actually “stealing our lives,” in the words of Rebecca Traister of Salon.com. Instead of allowing us new ways to handle our workload, our technology is just another time drain we must juggle along with coursework, extracurriculars, jobs and other activities.
Expectations increase along with technological improvement; now, because so many of my classmates have smart phones, I find myself rushing to reply to e-mails to avoid the appearance of negligence. I find the thought of my e-mail oppressive, as all my messages shout “Read me now!” in unison from my inbox.
A friend told me (via his Blackberry, of course) that before his smart phone upgrade, he was “really bad about reading and responding to e-mails, but now... I basically have to—the annoying notification icon won’t go away otherwise.”
It’s a classic Red Queen’s race scenario (my, but wouldn’t Lewis Carroll have a field day with us?). We’re all rushing to save as much time as possible but with very little benefit to our lifestyles. It takes all the running and e-mailing we can do to stay in exactly the same busy, frenetic place.
Sure, we might be able to send and receive information more quickly, but taking this as the sole standard of judgment implies that the e-mail is more important than the e-mailer, that our productivity has somehow superseded our independence in significance.
As for my little experiment, I heard back from all but two of my subjects. Those who replied from smart phones took an average of 15 minutes to respond. Those on old-fashioned computers took a little over two hours—more than an eightfold difference. I meant to send out thank-you e-mails for their participation, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Shining Li is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Monday.
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