Over Thanksgiving Break, I spent several days at my aunt and uncle’s house in rural Missouri. Now, this is one of the rare places that simply doesn’t have cell phone service. Doesn’t matter which carrier you use, you’re lucky to get one bar in the bathroom window or in the back left corner of the guest room. My aunt has a desktop computer with internet connection, but no wifi.
Let’s start with the obvious reaction: I am 20 years old and I wasn’t able to text my friends or boyfriend. It was rough. During brief trips to town (yay service!), I would try and read through the dozens of messages in my friends’ group chat just trying to catch up on the jokes and memes and stories. Similarly, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook were endless feeds of new information. I knew I was missing things. I felt isolated, cut off from the goings on of my friends. This was true to an even greater extent with my boyfriend, whom I normally text more or less constantly. Going 12 or 14 hours without communicating might not seem like a long time, but to me it felt like endless hours of silence, punctuated by frantic attempts to catch up, to have some sort of conversation before I move my phone slightly and service disappears again.
With the exception of being in theatres (and sometimes not even then…), I couldn’t remember the last time I watched a movie without my cell phone in my hand. It’s just become second nature to me: press play, and then text and play games and scroll through social media. Multitasking had become my default. But my phone was practically useless—I was finally forced to focus. Unluckily for me, I was being forced to focus on marathons of John Wayne movies and (how do I put this nicely?) Westerns just aren’t my cup of tea.
What struck me most, though, was how different interactions are without the presence of cell phones. No one was able to text. No one could mindlessly scroll through social media. If you couldn’t think of that one actor’s name, you had to ask others and figure it out, or just accept not knowing, because Google wasn’t there to help. Everyone was forced to be there in the moment, to focus on the conversation and on the people around them. It was almost as though the world had shrunk down and the only things that mattered were the people there in the room with you.
That’s a rare experience, in this world of cell phones, social media, and instant communication. As I was writing this article, I almost called it a “brief break from reality.” But that’s not what it was. It was a brief time in which I was forced to confront reality, in which I couldn’t retreat from the world around me. It was strange and somewhat wonderful, but I’m still glad it only lasted three days. It’s nice to be able to hide in the comfort of a cell phone, to communicate with people halfway around the world. But sometimes we need that break, even if we don’t realize it. We need to be reminded that our immediate surroundings deserve attention too.
Image credits: Cartoonstock, Twitter, Phone Arena, iOS8 Release