It’s hard to think of another product that has provided so many useful functions in such a handy form. But while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety.
While smartphones are meant to help us be more productive and connected, i believe it makes people distracted and closed off from the world around them.
We keep the gadget within reach more or less around the clock, and we use it in countless ways, consulting its apps and checking its messages and heeding its alerts scores of times a day.
This is the biggest problem with smartphones, smartphone have become so unhealthily obsessed with this technology, they can't go five minutes without having their smartphone within arms reach.
The two of you will be inseparable.
I can relate to this because even though I feel like I do not over-use my phone, I find that I get somewhat anxious if I don't have it for extended periods of time.
If you’re like the typical owner, you’ll be pulling your phone out and using it some 80 times a day, according to data Apple collects
As much as I try to limit my phone use, whenever I am bored or unoccupied I find myself reaching for my phone as if its been programmed into me.
I’d been tricked, it seems, by the formatting of the ebook. It seems that the final 1% of the book wasn’t Tolstoy at all, but a long pile of boilerplate public-domain verbiage.
While technology makes our lives easier in some ways, it makes it more difficult in others. You never truly know what to expect with technology these days as it is constantly, almost too fast to keep up with.
Those metrics gave me a fizzy sense of excitement of closing in on the end, much like the haptic sense of anticipation that comes when a huge novel has worn itself down to a few slender pages in your right hand.
I have never read an ebook and at this point in this article I am curious to see for myself whether or not reading a novel online is as rewarding as reading a paper one.
To pass the time, I’d pull out War and Peace, intending to read for only a few minutes — but then get sucked in, and stay there for an hour, lying on the ground.
This is how reading should be, you should get lost in what you are reading, unaware of outside distractions and worries.
The phone’s extreme portability allowed me to fit Tolstoy’s book into my life, and thus to get swept up in it. And it was being swept up that, ironically, made the phone’s distractions melt away.
It is obvious that smart phones are not going anywhere, they are a huge part of our lives whether we like to admit, so why not make them a productive part of our lives as well.
Today’s digital books do not give you the nearly-sensual, visual sense of “where” something is in a book. We remember bits of a book not just by the words, but how they looked on the page — where they were located, how our hands lay next to them.
This is exactly what I was trying to say in one of my previous annotations, ebooks are fake in a sense, a sorry imitation of what literature is meant to be.
Tolstoy reserves particular venom for historians who try to explain wars using simple, pat “great man” theories of history. Indeed, he’s nearly deranged by his disdain for this type of theorizing. Over and over again, Tolstoy launches into lunatic, chapter-long subtweets about how dumb historians are. I soon got used to the sudden appearance of these epic rants.
I wonder if while researching information about the novel, his opinion was influenced and changed in a way it would not have been if he were reading on paper.
t suddenly, War and Peace clicked for me. It was when Tolstoy shifted to his first battle scene. Suddenly his prose began to vibrate with descriptive force:
This is my favorite part about a novel. Up to this point you are just waiting for the story to hit that crucial point, where it turns on a dime from slow and uneventful, to riveting and fast paced. That anticipation is exhilarating and always keeps me on the edge of my seat.
Staying immersed in a book is a much easier if the book is, well, immersive. Tolstoy wasn’t, at the outset.
This relates to my previous annotation, books tend to take a while to develop and become exciting, which is why people get bored with them so easily. Humans are impatient, we want things to happen when we want them to happen.
Mind you, we’ve been fighting distraction for ages.
Humans have always been easily distracted and I do not think that will ever change. Being such complex creatures we are constantly driven to find something new to do. Humans adapt to things quickly and when you become familiar with something, while it may be easier and more comfortable, it becomes boring and tedious, which is one of the reasons I find it hard to complete certain things.
I also had to turn off my internal alerts. This is harder to do, and more crucial. We typically assume that outside interruptions — digital beeps and boops — are chiefly what wreck our focus. But as science-of-attention researchers like Gloria Marks have found, the bigger problem is self-interruption. We’re deeply social creatures. When we know that our pockets and purses contain full-on cocktail parties that are raging 24/7, we don’t need beeps and buzzes from social networks to break our concentration. We break it ourselves, voluntarily, checking and rechecking Facebook the instant our mind wanders away from the plot of a novel.
As much as I hate what smart phones, social media and other digital technologies have done to society, I still find myself constantly shifting my focus from my work, to apps like Snapchat, as if it were almost second nature.
I used to enjoy alerts; but with War and Peace, I shut them all down.
Is it possible having a book on your phone could actually help people be less distracted by useless alerts from social media outlets?
I was barely a half-hour into the book and already the critics of phones had scored a point: I was multitasking like a fiend.
While having the ability to look up information about the text is good in some situations, it may take away from the best part about reading a book, picking apart its themes and deciding what the text means to you. Your opinion could be influenced by outside information.
Then, to bury my feelings of guilt at having failed at finishing a Great Work, I’d hide it in the remote corner of a bookshelf where it would, hopefully, cease to haunt me.
I don't think reading an ebook would make this any less of an occurrence. In fact, I think it would make forgetting about the book that much easier, there is no need to hide it on your book shelf since all you have to do is press a delete button. I'm curious to see if this proves to be true or not.
Will our flighty brains ever get as much out of phone screens as paper? Are the great works of literature doomed to fade away like ghosts?
I think this kind of questioning can be applied to much more than just books. It speaks to the way younger generations seem to disregard certain traditions that have stood for decades.It is like a never ending cycle of out with the old, in with the new, as if our culture is some sort of clothing store needing constant updating.
Still, it makes you wonder about the future. I’m generally a giddy optimist about digital technologies; I think they’ve given us delightful new ways to make sense of the world and talk to each other.
I find this part interesting as I am generally the opposite. I am a firm believer that some digital technologies have ruined certain aspects of our society. There are certain things that technology just cannot do as well or as genuinely as the old fashioned way of doing it, which is proven by books.
It may also be, as the scholar Anne Mangen has found in her work, that our minds are slightly befuddled by navigating ebooks.
Ebooks can be confusing to people who are not familiar with the technology and as humans we get frustrated when something does not work the way we would like it to. Books are supposed to be relaxing, a sort of teleportation device that allows you to escape reality and not have to think about the frustrations of daily life.
Why? No one entirely knows. Some of it may simply be due to eyestrain ergonomics: Laptops require you to lean in for a long time to read a book, mobile-phone are shiny mirrors, and even a high-rez Kindle Paperwhite — which I own — feels somehow squintier that the stark contrast of dark ink on paper.
Books are more tangible than something you would read on a laptop or your smartphone and i personally feel a much deeper connection to a physical book than I do to something I read electronically. You can touch the book, feel the pages and really become part of what you are reading, which I think helps the reader delve deeper into the meaning of the story itself.