What Does Shemittah Have to Do with Smartphones? – B’har-B’hukkotai 5786 |
So this past week, I was in a supermarket, and I went to the front desk because I could not find the Cape Cod chips in the 100-calorie bag. I am trying to eat healthily. 😉
The woman behind the customer service desk and I had an interaction that went like this:
She was looking down at her phone.
“How can I help you?” she murmured.
I explained what I was looking for.
No reply. She kept texting.
“Um… do you know where these chips are?”
Still looking down, she said, “Aisle 12B, right side, one-third of the way down, bottom shelf.”
And the amazing thing is, she was totally helpful. She knew exactly where the item was.
But in the entire interaction, she never looked at me.
But, it’s not just her; I know I do this too. I can be on my phone and lose the sense that I am on my phone. I can be connecting lightly with people somewhere else, while not really connecting with the person right in front of me.
And when that happens, I am not only missing the other person.
I am missing the world around me.
That is why the first thing I do in my classes, as I did this past Wednesday night with our teens, is ask everyone to take out their phones, mine included, and put them face down in the middle of the room. We make a kind of Jenga tower of phones.
It’s a kind of ritual.
For this hour, we are with each other.
Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist at NYU Stern and author of The Anxious Generation, has helped shift our attention to the damage that phones and social media are doing to children and teens.
Seth Kaplan, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins and author of Fragile Neighborhoods, adds another important piece. He writes that phones “did not simply replace something good”; they “filled a void created by the earlier loss of community and the decline of the play-based........