Zuo Ying slowly realized her dependence on technology, like the frog boiled in warm water.
When she was a child, she liked to remember the road and bus route map: the ninth road car from her hometown drove to the old city and through the playground of her childhood; the eighth road car drove to the county town, and the dust was flying along the way, and the truck transporting animals traveled back and forth between the city and the county...
But now, "any time I enter the start and end points, I don't have to use my brain." At the same time, her once keen sense of direction is gradually deteriorating.
The loss of physical coordinates is just the beginning. In the "anti-technology dependence" Douban group established in 2021, there are more than 20,000 members, who embrace the convenience brought by technology, and also encounter "technology advances and retreats" to varying degrees: difficult to concentrate, no real and perceptible social interaction, large-scale mental anxiety, being accurately fed goods by algorithms, and being wrapped in homogeneous information.
They are putting into action, some people are physically isolated, locking the mobile phone into a box that can be timed, punching the phone and putting down the mobile phone for 30 days; some people use the old technology to create "inconvenience" and replace it with the elderly machine and ink screen; some people turn off the push, circle of friends and personalized recommendation functions; and some people are still struggling to find out what the cause of their dependence on technology is.
Getting technology back to where the tool is located is a common aspiration of many respondents. Back to the beginning of the beautiful story, is the freedom and pleasure brought to them by those technologies a mirror flower and a moon, how did they fall later, and how to resist and reflect on the invasion of technology into life?
"A lot of people seem to be living on their phones"
"I seem to be in a place surrounded on all sides, as if I were the only one in the world. All the connections came from the wire, and I couldn't see the person as he really was. Wang Yanbei, 27, is currently working from home in Shanghai, and she only needs to maintain the image on that screen, "change a top (clothes), makeup and don't want to wear makeup, wear a mask and draw an eyebrow" before the video conference.
After a day of electronic equipment, her eyes hurt and she felt sleepy, but she was very energetic when she lay in bed at night, "Why can't I sleep?" She was confused.
Before that, Wang Yanbei tried to alleviate sleep problems by basking in more sun and increasing exercise, but insomnia was inevitable. By reviewing what she was doing day by day, she found a question, "How can I look at my phone at all times, and do yoga (intermittently) and look at my phone?" ”
Wang Yanbei is also addicted to mobile games. When the unit went to work, she once encountered a lot of project pressure, she ran to the bathroom to play a round, and the guilt struck after playing. When working from home, there is no one around to supervise, and a person is anxious about handling heavy work, and she thinks to herself: How is this so difficult, go play a game and come back to write. The way to deal with stress seems to be only the game, "I don't know what to do if I don't play it, I don't want to look up some new information." ”
She realized that her cell phone had made her life heavy and out of order.
Yang Lu, a reporter at a beijing weekly magazine, is not addicted to mobile phones, but her difficulty is that mobile phones often "can't be shaken off."
The journalist's job requires her to browse the latest hot spots on social platforms and observe the reactions of the public. "From Weibo, I saw the public account, the self-media, repeatedly mentioned on similar topics, and the angles were similar." Yang Lu felt a little distressed, "It's good to take up time." ”
When writing a manuscript, someone sends a message to disrupt the work process, so she often mutes the phone and checks it when the task is completed. But she knows that many interviewees in commercial companies often have a dozen work groups by themselves, and they are constantly being struck by Aite, "They have no time at all compared to me." ”
A while ago, she went to a famous grotto for a business trip. It was raining lightly that day, the air was wet, and there were not many tourists traveling. Walking in the grotto, she felt that she was in a quiet time and space.
Walking along the road, she saw that few tourists around her enjoyed the scenery, and they subconsciously raised their mobile phones to record the pictures in front of them. Yang Lu began to feel strange, "Everyone is taking pictures, taking pictures of the grottoes, taking pictures of each other." However, there are many professional photos on the Internet, which can be seen, but your sense of experience in the current atmosphere can only be obtained by yourself when you go to the place. ”
"A lot of people seem to be living on their phones." Yang Lu said.
A similar scene, Song Yu also encountered a few months ago. At ten o'clock on a winter night in Beijing, a bus weaved through the streets, carrying eight tired late return passengers. In the darkness of the night outside the window, Song Yu, who was a medical doctor, looked up at the situation in the car, "At that time, I found that 7 people except me were all buried in the small screen in front of me. Like the workers working on the assembly line of the factory, no one gave a unified order, but everyone's movements were surprisingly similar, "I don't know why, I felt as if everyone was controlled." ”
Before getting out of the car, Song Yu noticed that a woman who was older than her had her neck stretched forward, constantly brushing vibrato videos, one after another, seemingly endlessly.
"There is no 'bottom line' in our social software"
In Guan Rui's memory, the previous web page had a "bottom line", that is, after browsing the current page, you need to click on the next page, "giving users mental and psychological rest and thinking time." And now "there's no 'bottom line' for social software," "you keep sliding it and it's always coming," and there's no end.
On the most exaggerated day, Guan Rui found that her screen time was up to 13 hours, which meant that she was holding her mobile phone except for sleeping. She was alone in the UK studying for a master's degree, and when she was sick or under academic pressure, she looked at her phone very often, but her long-term use made her feel "overwhelmed".
Infinite information nets people, and dense algorithms outline the portrait of people's behavior, accurately attracting people's attention, and it is not easy for people to escape or resist.
Xu Ke, a consumer management trainee at Huawei, found that the software on the market for free wifi will push small videos to users, which he feels deviates from the needs of people using the App themselves, and forcibly binds users to the software to increase browsing time.
According to his observation, in the teaching of traditional business schools, product design often starts with user needs and is aimed at obtaining profits, and many business school courses do not discuss business ethics. "The user's attention and time are economic benefits, and the software always has new stimuli to attract you to stay in it."
A clear example is that every time you like a friend in the WeChat circle of friends, you will receive a continuous stream of likes and comments from your mutual friends, and those red digital markers repeatedly remind users to go and check it. Li Xing, who has worked for an airline in Guangzhou for 3 years, hates this design, "The technical level is to make people more places in the circle of friends, increase your clicks and further strengthen your muscle memory." ”
Guan Rui has seen the documentary "Surveillance Capitalism", and she has a sentence that impresses her, "If you don't spend money on products, then you are the products that are being sold." In the film, some employees who left from American Internet companies slammed the seemingly free social platform for selling users' big data to advertisers, who were also happy to "buy certainty."
Source: Documentary "Social Dilemma"
In 2021, up master "Teacher Hello My Name Is He Classmate" questionnaire counted the time spent by 5289 users on mobile phones, an average of 8 hours and 4 minutes per day, which is basically equivalent to a day of work in a mobile phone.
The paper "Multidisciplinary Factorial And Integrative Interpretation of the Dependence of Digital Media Technology" talks about the addiction mechanism of media technology: the novel stimuli presented by media technology induce the release of dopamine and activate the reward system, so that the user's brain nerve center remains excited... Continuously extend the use time.
"You need the dopamine you need from your phone as soon as you wake up"
Wang Yanbei specifically went to check the paper, saying that the blue light of mobile phones will affect the secretion of melatonin (a hormone that promotes sleep) and increase people's alertness. She thinks of herself holding her phone all day, "always thinking about all kinds of things, especially hi, I can't sleep when I'm hi." ”
In the paper, the cold research conclusions of "affecting vision", "eye fatigue" and "insomnia" correspond to her real-life state, making her want to unload the heavy burden of excessive dependence.
She consciously turned off her phone and iPad regularly, reviewing what she had done throughout the day by writing a diary. She found herself easily attracted to other content on the page when she looked up information, and once recorded the actual time spent looking up information and browsing without doing anything. The former is half an hour, the latter is two hours — the data on the screen makes Wang Yanbei wary and begin to limit the length of time he can use the app.
She set the deactivation time for the software in the iPad, open the iPad at 10-19 o'clock, the app will turn gray, and click to show "Today's use has reached the limit". She wants to regain control of her life and sleep by reducing her dependence on electronic devices a little bit.
In her report on the topic of "Saving Sleep," Ms. Yang interviewed a number of doctors in sleep clinics and learned that excessive smartphone use is associated with anxiety and insomnia (the University of Illinois study found that frequent use of technology products is at greater risk of anxiety and depression), and she is more concerned about how long she spends her phones.
Yang Lu read "Shallow, how the Internet poisoned our brains" in her early years, mentioning that the push and presentation of the Internet will distract people's attention, and people's brains have long developed fragmented patterns of receiving information, consciously interrupting thinking, and then it will be difficult to think deeply. Over the years, she has observed many people around her holding their mobile phones all the time, or frequently pulling out their mobile phones to browse, echoing the contents of the book. Yang Lu therefore sees smartphones as "black holes that absorb intelligence and attention."
Friends mentioned Kitchen Safe (the box used to lock the phone) to her in the chat, and before she could finish introducing the matter, Yang Lu searched for a haitao shop from Taobao and ordered one.
Kitchen Safe arrived quickly. Its most expensive place is the box lid, there is a large circular button on it, when you rotate it, the display will tell the user the time to lock, adjust it and press down, the box will be locked. In the United States, some consumers use this box to quit sweets, alcohol, and drug dependence. At 11 p.m., Yang Lu threw the phone into the box, set it locked for 10 hours, pressed the button, and immediately felt at peace.
Kitchen Safe network diagram
Song Yu feels that mobile phones will make them "vulnerable" and surrounded by homogeneous information, "Your thinking mode is converging under the wrapping of information, not spontaneous convergence." ”
She directly opened a record post of "not playing mobile phones for 30 days" in the Douban "anti-technology dependence" group. In the first three days, after getting up and going to the toilet, Song Yu had a strong desire to brush his mobile phone, "How terrible and strange, when I wake up every day, I need the dopamine provided by my mobile phone." ”
She drank coffee, remembered the succulents she had just seen, and couldn't wait to open Taobao to buy pots, succulents and soil. She thought about it for a moment: she could use the discarded cups in the house, a little dirt from the flower bed downstairs, and the leaves that fell from the succulents of her roommate. Thinking of this, her outstretched hand stopped.
Four or five more hours a day, Song Yu, who pulled out from the small screen, found that the sofa at home was already full of clothes, and many things could be sold when they were idle..." That was the first time I began to examine my home and began to transform and create a life I wanted. ”
Song Yu packed up the sofa
For thirty days, Song Yu controlled the daily mobile phone usage time to about half an hour. She has an apple watch, which she uses to watch time and answer the phone, and checks the WeChat reply message three times in the morning, middle and evening.
Many people in her Douban group practice punching like her: Li Ran, who is an interprofessional graduate student, tries to use a Caton ink screen mobile phone to reduce his addiction; Guan Rui bought a Nokia to live a minimalist electronic life; Xu Ke will turn off the functions involving personalized recommendations before using the software, "I am afraid that it will only recommend to me what I like to watch." ”
Kwan Rui's Nokia phone
"Moderate anti-connectivity" and social platform offloading
Peng Lan, a professor at Chinese Min University, wrote in his paper that today's people are facing the burden of excessive connection, such as fatigue and oppression under strong interaction, the constraints of stratification on individuals and the separation of society, the squeezing of offline connections by online overconnection, the pressure of excessive connection between people and content, and the excessive dependence on "external existence". In the context of overconnection, moderate anti-connectivity may become a new law of the Internet.
In November last year, Li Xing closed the entrance to the circle of friends, and the decision was made with many considerations.
Before he often clicked into the circle of friends, muscle memory fingers slid down to refresh; after updating the status, he was looking forward to whether more people would like and interact with him, "I don't like this psychological state." For work reasons, in two or three years, his WeChat friends have risen from 300 to 1,000, but most of them are only working relationships and are not familiar in reality, which makes him hesitate to content before releasing the circle of friends.
Before the complete closure, he made several similar attempts, and gradually found that his attention to the content of the circle of friends decreased. He values the information increment brought by the content, but every dynamic in the circle of friends, do he really want to "care about everything"?
After closing, he heard about EDG's victory on a morning news program of a podcast, and he was glad that he closed the circle of friends, "The feeling of watching the circle of friends brushing the screen is not good at all." I don't care about this myself, and my energy and attention are limited, and I don't want to be passively distracted when the circle of friends is brushed. ”
He pays more attention to his relatives and friends, and occasionally clicks into his friends' homepage to care about the latest situation. "My friends also know that I don't use my circle of friends much, and reducing online social interaction will not affect our real relationship." When he wants to share the dynamics himself, he will first set the privacy, and after three days, he will "unblock" to avoid frequent interactions in real time, but at the same time, it also has a recording effect, and friends want to know and be able to see.
"If your real-world social networking is very fulfilling, you probably don't care as much about how many people like and comment on you." Li Xing said.
When Li Ran was in college, she was keen on online social networking, using the Internet buzzword as "creating a person". Whenever you publish a circle of friends, you have to think about how to write the copy, how to take pictures to look good, who can see who is not visible, these additional matters are mixed into her initial happy sharing state. After sharing, she will care about the interaction of friends and likes, and after the whole process, she feels some "internal friction".
Specializing in communication theory, Li Ran feels that "the circle of friends is like a mobile stage, you don't know who your audience is, so you often want to be a person who is all-round, but no one can really do it." "Under the shadow of the virtual aura of the Internet, people seem to be wearing masks, somewhat losing their real selves and physical social interactions.
Li Ran feels that being fed by the information flow of social platforms for a long time will lose her ability to freely choose and focus on the flow of herself. During the preparation period, she deleted the public account she had followed in the past, leaving only the relevant number for the preparation. "We also communicate with each other and do not miss important information."
"Whether people need information or need blanks, I currently think people need blanks more." After going through the 30-day plan, Song Yu thought so.
She is pursuing a doctorate in medicine and wants to immerse herself in the fields of medicine and writing, finance, and sports, rather than focusing on it. She understands that the popular ice and snow sports and Hanfu are all positive cultures, but in terms of commodity attributes, it is also a "created demand". She will first distinguish between indoctrination and external indoctrination.
The fragmented information on the Internet is so cumbersome that Song Yu feels that they are not as reliable as the time-tested theoretical content in the books, "Moreover, a wrong view brings harm to people more than the benefits of a correct view." She likes a cleaner information environment and more ample time after the 30-day plan, and if her brain is filled with useful and useless information, "I will not be free." ”
"Victory on local battlefields"
Even if Zuo Ying chooses a more "local" life, it is difficult to be an individual who is completely detached from technical dependence. Near the graduation season, when browsing recruitment information and company employment experience with information anxiety, Zuo Ying will be attracted by the company's internal gossip pushed by the webpage, look at it with relish, and regret that she wasted time after reading it; she often can't get change when she goes shopping with cash in the provincial capital city where she lives, and finally switches to mobile payment.
"But in urban villages, third-tier cities and smaller places, cash usage is acceptable, and there is a lot of room for conversation, even if it is a bargain." Zuo Ying described it as "like a wrist-breaking process" with a mobile phone. Sometimes I have to concede defeat, but in some local small battlefields I can still get small victories. ”
Xu Ke also pulls back and forth in his anti-dependence attempts, and in his metaphor, the process is like "a clever spider weaves a strong web to move forward, but the behavior is forever trapped in this net."
In his junior year, he did a week of "no smart device + use cash" practice, the benefit is that "time and attention are liberated". At that time, he printed two articles that had been collected in the Zhihu database for a long time but had not been carefully read, and after repeated reading, he gained a lot and remembered it vividly.
He used an analogy to his previous habit of "collecting" good articles on smart devices, "I'm like a fisherman... The fish on the fish stewed two bites into the refrigerator and quickly returned to the beach, afraid of missing the opportunity to catch the next fish... However, there are too many fish in this sea, and there is a cost to fishing. ”
Xu Ke remembers that in "Social Psychology", too many choices cause people's satisfaction to decline. In the week away from the smart device, at least his options have become less, and the mood is "simple and comfortable a lot".
The difficulty is that he pays in cash, can buy movie tickets in 2 minutes online on weekdays, and it takes 10 minutes to buy offline seats, and he can't enjoy the discount. In the class before the end of the semester, everyone took a tablet to circle the electronic data while searching, and he could only hold a book and chew words. Modern life and contact rely heavily on smart devices, and he "pardons" himself every night to handle matters related to the docking of community information and the exchange of classmates.
At the end of the week, he picked up the smart device and used the Internet to learn and supplement notes. For him, the parts of technology that improve life and provide convenience do not need to be forcibly discarded, he wrote in his diary, "Whether it is the Internet or life, find your own rhythm." "This is an even bigger gain after his experiments.
Xu Ke's diary
Li Ran also thinks like this, she believes that technology is one and the same, the advantages and disadvantages are half, "there is no need to be a living home, nothing, live on the top of the mountain." In the process of resisting "mobile phone addiction", she will use office efficiency apps to resist addictive technologies with technologies that can improve people's lives.
"Into Life"
After trying to quit the number dependence, Wang Yanbei vacated time to push the door out, feeling that all the senses were mobilized, "Entering life allowed me to see a lot of things that I didn't know before." ”
There are plane trees near her house, and she takes a slow walk, and she hears the sound of motors driving across the road, the "rustling" of leaves blown by the wind, and the grandparents in Shanghai talking. The middle path will be quiet, and if you look closely, you can see the different states of the people around you. While shopping, she chatted happily with the owner of the import and export discount store and the owner of the vegetable stall.
She tried to walk a street that she had never walked before, and along the way, she looked at the introduction of the characteristic buildings and felt that "these people and these things used to exist in this place before."
Zuo Ying will also consciously contact and talk with the personnel of the restaurant, electrical repair shop and waste recycling station near the residence, and become acquainted with the owner of a snack grocery store. Sometimes she needs to buy goods, she will call the boss directly, and the boss will help the surrounding old customers to enter some daily necessities at a low price after changing careers. "I think this form of shopping is more warm and humane." She said.
Guan Rui, who did the Nokia experiment, now controls the daily use of the phone to 2 hours, leaving more time for in-depth reading. Together with her colleagues, Yang Lu wrote "40 Things About the Disappearance of the Internet", such as asking for directions, CDs, emptying, patience, and photos that look real, commemorating these fading beauty. Li Xing, who is in Guangzhou, found that looking at paper maps allows him to "light up the geographical coordinates in the city" in his mind, and there is a connection between places and places, no longer an endpoint in the numbers.
After putting down the phone for 30 days, Song Yu felt that "his heart was more relaxed."
In order to change the habit of subconsciously brushing electronic devices before going to bed, Song Yu put the mobile phone at the entrance of the home to charge, not into the bedroom. Instead, she put a book at the head of the bed and habitually turned a few pages at night.
She used to use online car hailing and ordering takeaways, but in the implementation plan, she chose to take the bus, cook her own meals or eat in the canteen, saving 3,000 yuan a month. Some takeaway software will remind users at the meal point that the user can order food, and Song Yu feels, "Some needs can be replaced, or they don't exist." ”
On Christmas Eve last year, she invited friends to her house for hot pot. She likes this kind of face-to-face communication, offline close-up sharing, "online social can not replace the real social, you can hesitate to reply on the Internet, real-life communication needs to be observed, people's reactions are immediate." ”
On the way to the lab, she simply walked instead of keeping her eyes on her phone. She pays more attention to the sky overhead, the scenery along the way, and the lush trees around her, which feel like a familiar childhood time, and need to find fun to spend empty time. She picked up some branches and stuck them in bottles at home, growing vegetables and flowers at home, "I'm really playing, not playing on my phone." ”
Flowers planted by Song Yu
"Actually, I think there's some similarity between drugs and technology." Song Yu worked in a hospital for a year before her PhD, and she gave examples of drugs for high blood pressure that relieve symptoms and regulate blood pressure more than treat them at all.
She feels that technology is similar. People escape from real life through games, divert their attention by watching short videos, and try to use technology to alleviate anxiety or uncertainty. "But technology may often treat the symptoms rather than the root cause, it is not what motivates us to be happy, our happiness still needs to be obtained by ourselves, it is an active thing."
At the end of the "30 Days Without Playing with Mobile Phones" program, Song Yu wrote in the post: "My relationship with mobile phones: it is my tool, but it is not the whole of my life. ”
(At the request of the interviewees, Wang Yanbei, Song Yu, Li Ran, Guan Rui, and Xu Ke are pseudonyms)