This blog post briefly summarizes two interviews (1, 2) with Brooklyn teenager Logan Lane, who intentionally gave up the smart phone she'd been addicted to, and started a club of like-minded kids. Since the two interviews cover a lot of the same ground, I've interleaved my summaries of them as if it was a single interview. Text is square brackets is my commentary.
Lane is a high school senior as of 2022. She was a super-extreme phone and social media addict from ca. age 11 to 14. She feels that "starting so early" was bad, that phone use gets "engraved in the brain," and she also describes the physical changes in her hands from holding the phone so much.
Her freshman year of high school coincided with the covid school closures. She saw other kids doing cool offline stuff during covid, and she felt she was wasting her life.
She put her phone in a box in her parents' room; her dad made fun of her, predicted she'd fail. She deactivated her social media accounts. She was afraid she would lose her friends, and it sounds like she mostly did. She still used email and iCloud through her desktop mac. She got a flip phone.
Most of the kids at school acted as though she'd disappeared. Instead of doing social media during zoom classes, she knitted.
She went from being extroverted to introverted. She went back to in-person school for 10th grade. She's captain of cross country team, into punk rock.
Formed the Luddite Club, with a name invented by her mom, with a girl she ran into on the street. They immediately felt an interest in one another because they were phoneless and didn't know anyone else who was. They had to reconnect by accident.
The club meets every Sunday at a library and goes and sits in a circle in a park. "Not every member has a flip phone, but there's definitely a sense of pride to be a Luddite who has made the switch." "We've really bonded over books as well."
She talks about a smartphone the way an alcoholic talks about booze: other people can do it in moderation, but I know I can't. She fears losing the "authentic me" if she goes back online. She is "envious" of people who can use a phone in moderation.
"And when I look around and I see always on the subway, I see so many people on their phones and you know, it gets me wondering how their lives would change as a result and if they would positively be impacted, just as has occurred for me." [But she doesn't seem to describe actually alienated from these people, just sorry for them.]
She describes the benefits in her own life. Her disordered sleep patterns cleared up. She feels that it can help people (not just herself) with their "emotional maturity." She has turned on to "all the wonderful intellectual stimulation that books bring." She has a lot more "idle time" while commuting to school on the train, and now she uses that to read books.
"I used to really not like school. In middle school, I got my phone taken away all the time, so much that my my principal had to call my parents to get them to pick up my phone." "And I now, I absolutely adore school... I'm much more able to be in the moment..." Previously, she'd seen school as "just an excuse to see my peers."
Her friendships are "more intentional." Her group of friends is "a lot tighter knit." Previously, she'd been focused on kids who seemed cool online, and had felt torn between wanting to emulate them and wanting to reject the online culture of being cool (which she sometimes expressed by posting intentionally unflattering photos of herself). She likes not feeling like every minute has to be filled up by being with other kids.
She had to get an uber once at night, so she called her parents to get them to do it. She fears problems if she goes to college and they require two-factor authentication. [She never mentions civil liberties or mass surveillance, or totalitarian use of phones in China.]
She thinks many parents play a negative role. "It's as if our parents are encouraging it when they make us check in and contact them all the time." "[...] my parents definitely feared what would happen when I lost the ability to check in. And [I] mean eventually what happened was I started being more reasonable about my hours. I kind of felt like if I'm not if I'm not able to tell them what time I'm going to be home, I ought to be home and, you know, at like seven or something."
'...if my parents had approached me and been like, "Here's this cool way that might make your life better," I would be like, "Why aren't you doing it? Like, What if you're so into this? I don't see you going off your phone."' But her parents did do phone-free family vacations.
She doesn't read a newspaper, but she feels it was positive to tune out the Trump administration. Previously, she'd gotten her news from instagram. Now she gets her news secondhand from her father.
She actively advocates that other teens should try giving up their phones to see what it's like to do it when it's not a punishment but a choice. [One of the interviewers coaxes her into making a pitch to an imaginary teen, but it's unclear whether she actually has this kind of prosyletizing attitude.]
Ben Crowell, 2023 Feb. 4
This post is CC-BY-ND licensed.