Recognizing the impact phones have on our lives
Aside from being germ magnets, they represent a threat we don’t appear to comprehend
OK, tell me if this sounds familiar: you walk in your front door, put your phone and keys down, take off your coat, wash your hands, and then pick up your phone again … and in so doing, reapply all the germs you’ve just washed off your hands.
COVID-19 health warnings and awareness campaigns tell us over and over again to wash our hands, wear a mask and social distance, but almost never mention anything about wiping down our phones. The UK government’s slogan — “Hands, face, space” — is perhaps the best example of the smartphone’s omission.
Some quick research is sobering: our phones carry more bacteria and viruses than the average toilet seat, and COVID-19 can live on smartphones for several days. Not that several days would be needed for contagion, given how frequently we touch our phones and our faces.
A 2016 study published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection found that over 50 per cent of health-care workers — who are rigorously trained to be vigilant about hygiene — admitted to using their phones at work, and even while seeing patients. The study, done in French hospitals, found epidemic viruses living on 40 per cent of the 109 phones they tested.
None of this is top-secret intel, so how is it that our phones have escaped notice in the onslaught of health warnings — on TV, on the radio, on posters and notice boards and signs and emails and memos and just everywhere for months on end. The only place I found mention of smartphones as possible transmitters of the virus was in one of the animated videos produced by the feds which warned against touching someone else’s phone. What about our own phones? Are they protected by some kind of magical cleansing aura?
Well, no, but they sure as hell seem to be protected by some kind of aura — they so often escape culpability. When I first thought about writing on this subject, I was going to talk about the other things phones are responsible for that we don’t talk about: an increase in cases of head lice, and more resilient and resistant head lice; increased rates of myopia in young people; dowagers’ humps in teenagers, along with chronic neck pain ….
But then my family watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix over the holiday, and I realized with a kind of sinking, heavy dread, that viruses and head lice were awfully small potatoes compared to the end of civilization as we knew it.
Yes, “knew” in past tense, because it’s already happening.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist — not by a long shot. I don’t believe that COVID is a hoax. I don’t believe that vaccines cause autism. I don’t believe that the rich and powerful have planned a “Great Reset” (although Disaster Capitalism is certainly alive and kicking).
But I believe in what the whistleblowers of “The Social Dilemma” are telling us. I believe their warnings about how communication has largely been reduced to capitalist manipulation, and how our civility and democracy are being whittled away as algorithms worm their way further and further into our lives. Everyone should see this film, even if they think they already know what it’s going to say. I thought I had this topic covered — I mean, I teach it in some of my classes — but I didn’t have nearly a good enough handle on the enormity of it.
What’s even scarier is that the film was made pre-COVID: when we feel we’re under attack we’re more sensitive to threat, and our brains are more susceptible to paranoia. Isolated and staring at screens, people in lockdown are more likely to believe things like conspiracy theories and to see other human beings as enemies instead of allied in a social fabric.
It’s fairly mainstream to track the degradation of our environment and talk about our own possible extinction, but our extinction due to all-out social chaos; due to the disappearance of the fine threads of understanding and reason that hold civilization together; due to the disappearance of a basic understanding of what is true … and all because of the power of Facebook, Google, Twitter and Instagram to shape our behaviour so they can sell more ads? We don’t talk about that nearly enough.
And we certainly don’t talk enough about the poor souls employed to screen content for these sites, spending hour after hour looking at the darkest, most depraved images and acts that humanity can. We trade their emotional well-being for our entertainment. We get funny cat videos, and they get PTSD.
We overlook these things all the time, even though they’re staring us in the face. When the world’s turned upside down — borders closed, entire industries shut down, hospitals overrun — we hold onto our phones even tighter, but still without seeing them, really seeing them, at all.