Picture from Pixabay (free-to-use CCO)
When the iPad was first released in 2010, I remember debating with friends whether these devices would be used primarily for creating content or consuming it? It seemed obvious that this technology was the perfect vehicle for mainlining entertainment, but also that artists, filmmakers, photographers, writers, and other creators could make very good use of it. In this way, there was an interesting dynamic tension built into the iPad.
Fifteen years later, this debate seems quaint to me. What I didn’t anticipate then was how the distinction between creating content and consuming it would be erased by daily use of this technology. The iPad is a productivity tool—I write with it and use it extensively in my teaching—but time spent on the iPad is a blur of activity, a sometimes frenetic toggling between apps in a mostly unconscious hunt for dopamine hits. In the pre-iPad world, boredom would lead me to stand up and do something different. Now my finger deftly searches out another app and I dive into the next thing without having moved an inch. And so my iPad usage is a hopscotch through available apps and activities. Creating. Consuming. It is all part of the same digital slipstream mediated on an 11-inch touchscreen.
And it has proved to be addictive. If the iPad were something I inhaled through a rolled-up fifty-dollar bill or injected into my veins, there would have been an intervention long ago. But in true American fashion, addiction itself is not the problem; it is the vector for addiction that brings on judgment, intervention, and punishment. I could spend eight hours a day on the iPad with little more than raised eyebrows from my wife and daughter to let me know that I had a problem. I was a functioning iPad-aholic, but who really cares when the object of your addiction is one of the most beloved consumer products in history.
It wasn’t until I put my iPad in a drawer for two weeks that I began to understand the pernicious effects of this device. Over the Christmas break, I essentially ceased using my iPad, relying instead on my phone for communication and my desktop computer for work and surfing the web. This self-imposed fast essentially compartmentalized key functions of my life into separate devices. I quickly learned how much that little screen was mediating my entire life.
Here is the biggest takeaway from my iPad fast: the frictionless lifestyle is not good for us.
I realize, of course, that the iPad is not a lifestyle, but it is a kind of avatar for the new digitally mediated society that is emerging in our midst. The iPad perfectly symbolizes the digital revolution—the scrolling, swiping, and touching; the easy access to information and communication; the way in which a single device bundles together on a single screen a host of functions that were once compartmentalized in the fleshworld. The ease with which the nagging itch of boredom is effortlessly sated when before, it led to me to switch the channel with my whole body. Stand up and walk across the room, or out the front door, or into my car where I would drive somewhere. Over time, the iPad has put a spell on me. I carry it around the house with me so I can listen to podcasts. I sometimes sit with it for hours, jumping into a game of chess and then watching a few YouTube videos, and then writing a little, and then checking my emails, and then watching an episode of…whatever, on Netflix.
It was not merely the screen time report, though that was a shock. It was the realization that my iPad-fueled version of “living online” is robbing me of the kind of rich interactions and experiences that had once made my life fully three-dimensional. I wrote in another blog post of wishing I could have my 2003 brain back. THAT was a time in which the screen-induced brain rot had yet to set in. My life was filled with long walks on the Delaware River and long interior monologues and dinner parties with friends. My pre-iPad brain was just healthier. My fast reminded me that a version of me existed before I was pickled in social media, YouTube, and Netflix.
Let’s begin with chess. I often play chess on the iPad as a kind of filler activity in my day, a way to pass the time when that dopamine itch needs to be scratched. The Chess.com app is always waiting for me in these moments. Sometimes I play live players, but mostly I play the chess bots. Until recently, this was a daily activity. I have played hundreds, perhaps thousands of games of chess this way. However, there was a time in my life when chess was a face-to-face activity. I would meet a friend sometimes in the Marietta square at the Australian Bakery, with my beautiful hand-carved Polish chess set tucked under my arm. We would play for a few hours, leisurely games without a clock where the action was punctuated by lots of conversation. This activity would stretch out for 3 - 4 hours, the better part of an afternoon.
Which of these modes of playing chess is the healthiest and most satisfying, do you think? The answer should be obvious.
I could make a similar argument about time spent on social media.
That earlier incarnation of me I described would often drive to other towns to meet friends. Sometimes he would drive to NYC or Philadelphia. There were dinner parties and bar nights and concerts and deep 1 a.m. conversations in a little coffee shop somewhere on the Upper East Side or Brooklyn. There were too many of these interactions to count, and they were all in person. The phone was for arranging social events and occasionally, long languid late-night conversations with a friend or lover. It was a minor prop in my old life.
Yes, I was younger and unmarried then, but a tectonic shift has occurred in social dynamics over the past twenty years that at least partially explains why I have far fewer of these rich interactions in my life (the COVID crisis shares some blame as well, for driving me indoors in a way that I am only now just beginning to understand). It was just easier for me to achieve a satisfying three-dimensionality to my relationships twenty years ago because face to face was the only game in town. The internet had yet to create seductive avenues for ducking out of the messier aspects of relationships. Facebook, which promises an abundance of friendships, is the palest reflection of my 3D relationships, mere shadows flickering on a cave wall.
Netflix is another app that has rearranged the social geography of my life. From my twenties through my mid-forties, I was a faithful movie-a-week film fan—movies in theaters I mean. Sometimes I would go with friends, but most often I went alone. I craved the experience of sitting in a theatre with anonymous strangers, waiting for the lights to go down and previews to begin. This ritual was deeply rooted, and healthy. It got me out of the house once a week and put me in the path of inspiration—an artist’s date, with myself, to borrow a term from Julie Cameron’s excellent book The Artist’s Way. Sadly, the easy availability of streaming services for movies and TV series has dissolved this ritual over time.
This new life mediated through an iPad screen is deeply unsatisfying. I spend a lot of time mindlessly toggling between activities that once required real forethought and preparation from me. In their fully inflated 3D versions, these were actual events—a chess outing, a dinner out with friends, a solo trip to the movie theater. I had to dress for them and drive to them. They came with social obligations and sometimes the messiness and unpredictability that accompanies real relationships. Someone shows up an hour late and doesn’t call or says something offensive or insulting. Sometimes the pot roast burns in your friend’s oven or relationship drama swallows up the entire evening. Someone three rows back is talking through the movie. You get a flat tire on the drive into the city.
My iPad has made me lazy. There, I said it. Overuse of it has dulled my taste for the flavors of life that were once indispensable to me.
I still have a three-dimensional life—mine hasn’t been entirely compressed and digitized yet—but it is a shriveled crisp compared to what it was a few decades ago. My iPad is not entirely to blame for this, but it has become the symbol for the tidal forces that have swept me out to this unhappy place.
When Steve Jobs rolled out the iPad in 2010, his whole pitch revolved around the fact that this device bundled activities that were previously only possible on separate devices. It was classic consumer capitalist logic, the easy assumption that we both want and need everything in our lives to be easier, more accessible, more streamlined, and more juiced with entertainment. I get the want part; Americans have certainly demonstrated a hunger for consumer products that reduce the friction in life and keep us perpetually entertained, but is the frictionless lifestyle actually good for us? I am increasingly convinced that it is not.
The iPad is an enabler for the sedentary, too-tired-to-go-out, mindlessly scrolling app-ification of American life. What can I do about it? The solution cannot revolve around platitudes about self-discipline or seeking balance. The iPad is not like any other consumer device I’ve owned. It is a siren calling out to me to pick it up, play with it, find something interesting. The hardware and software packaged within it was designed by an army of engineers who specialize in mining my attention. The only interventions that work for me are draconian ones—the “fast” or permanent abstention. The “Downtime” feature works well to limit the time of day when certain apps are available. The bottom line: I have yet to find a way to comfortably integrate this device into a healthy lifestyle.
I need more friction in my life, more time-consuming and inefficient but still pleasurable interactions. More conversation for the sake of it. Less time staring at a screen. More movement, in a car, on my two feet. This is the whole point of working out, to create friction, but the same basic principle applies to many other aspects of life. I’m learning this now.
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