Emma Brockes wrote an essay for The Guardian called In praise of being alone on our smartphones, together:

The act of being with someone—or better yet, a group of people—and on one’s phone is just the modern iteration of a key pleasure of family life: to be among those whom one is sufficiently comfortable with to drift in and out of communication. Like doing homework at the kitchen table, it is the state of doing your own thing while others do theirs around you. The point is, whatever you are doing on your phone, it would be less pleasurable were you to be doing it alone in your room.

Screen addiction alters this, and there are levels of disengagement that can turn a sentient being into a piece of furniture, but the parameters of acceptable phone use should surely widen at this point to permit some middle way between being on one’s phone and considered rude, or turning the device off altogether.

The title of the essay is a clever reference to Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. It’s a book I enjoyed a lot, despite it being relentlessly full of depressing paragraphs like this:

Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.

[A] stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.

I recommend danah boyd’s It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens as a positive palate cleanser afterwards.

Anyway, back to Emma’s article. She also references Susan Dominus’s Motherhood, Screened Off, an article that was in heavy rotation towards the end of last year. Susan makes the point that smartphones result in a lack of transparency, since people (i.e. our kids…) don’t know what we’re up to when we’re on them:

It is that loss of transparency, more than anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she apprised herself of the news. […] All was overt: There was much shared experience and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific use of which is almost never apparent.

And that’s where the answer to all of this comes back to “it’s complicated.” Yes, sometimes it’s ok to be alone on our devices, together in quiet contentment. But other times the lack of transparency about what we’re doing can be incredibly alienating to others. This wouldn’t be a problem if we could tell the difference between the two situations perfectly, every time. But alas, we are only human.