The phone in my face
By Sharla Gorder
The phone slammed into my face and bounced off the inner edge of my eye socket. I yelped.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to go camping for a night or two — to get ourselves into nature, out of our routines and away from our screens.
I had become increasingly disturbed by the amount of time we’d been spending indoors, heads down, clicking and scrolling, “surfing” and browsing, lurking and “liking,” and otherwise engaging, not with each other or the real world, but with our myriad screens.
We invited my brother and his girlfriend to join us, and the four of us set up camp in the beautiful Blackwater River State Forest, just an hour north, at the Krul Recreation Area near Bear Lake.
I packed little more than my hiking boots — leaving all my “screens” at home. Well, almost all. I did bring my phone “in case of emergency,” but I turned it off and tucked it away. I had even decided not to take photos, as that would require interaction with it — and studies show that even having your phone visible is a distraction. And why would I want to distract myself in the first place? I was out in nature in a gorgeous setting with wonderful weather and cherished people.
It wasn’t until bedtime that I gave in and got my phone out. There was a big front coming through and I wanted to know when to expect the storm. We had been lying in our sleeping bags, holding the phone aloft, checking the radar, when Ted accidentally dropped it.
On my face. The irony of it was just too perfect. I had been whingeing and whining about how everyone everywhere has a phone in their face, and here I was, quite literally, grappling with my iPhone 15 Pro as it bounced off my nose.
It left a mark. I didn’t know it until much later as we were leaving. I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror — and there between my eyebrows was an angry red welt.
Despite my noblest intentions that weekend, I still fell prey to the lure of the screen. I had no good reason for getting the thing out — there were three other iPhones readily available to check the weather — but I just couldn’t resist. And I’m not alone.
It’s one thing to spend hours alone on our devices, but I’ve noticed an even more disturbing trend. Even in social settings, we grope for our phones. It seems we can’t tell our stories without getting our phones out. We used to use our imaginations and language to tell our tales. Now we have to scroll through thousands of photos while in conversation to show the photo that illustrates our narrative. (Or we’ve just got to find that song or meme or text.) How much conversation time is spent searching our phones? And so many of our stories these days tend not to be ours at all, but a retelling of something we’ve seen online. We begin searching for it and then often get tangled in the web for a few minutes, losing the thread of the conversation completely.
I was recently at a party — a lovely event with wonderful people and delicious food — and I looked around and counted seven people, heads down, on their phones. And it’s always, ostensibly, to “check the weather” or some other oh-so-important thing.
It’s kinda sad, I think.
And darkly funny. When I emerged from my tent in the morning with a gash on the bridge of my nose, I explained the previous night’s mishap to my brother. He looked at my face, and with mock gravity stated the obvious.
“Sharla, if your phone is leaving wounds on your face, you might have a serious problem.”
I might.
