We are in an abusive relationship with our phones
conversationalist.org
conversationalist.org
> Nearly every hand in the room shot up.
> “Now, please put up your hand if you trust your smartphone.”
> One young guy at the back put his hand in the air, then faltered as it became obvious he was alone. I thanked him for his honesty and paused before saying,“We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship.”
For this and other reasons, I'm switching to the Light Phone 2 [1]. I get it later this month. Devices like this don't solve all of our problems, but they certainly solve many.
I.e. the author is manipulating facts. Trust has nothing to do with it. Obviously, if a person does not trust anybody, not every relationship they get into is abusive to them.
My family uses alternative messaging with me while I'm at work and you'd be surprised how people really don't care if you don't text them back until the end of the day.
When I get home, the smartphone goes upstairs where I'll hear it ring if someone calls. At this point, it's a glorified GPS and Spotify/Audible device. The only time I'm actively on it is in between sets at the gym in the morning.
Um. I feel that the article could have done without this snipe.
Like I once wrote¹, this came out of nowhere, and is presented as if every reader should obviously agree with it. Is “far-right” supposed to be something which is obviously inherently bad? I can see the case for using the term “alt-right” in that sense. But right/left? The whole point of the right/left terminology is that it’s not settled which of them is correct. If it were, we’d just call them good/bad instead of left/right.
In an article which has nothing to do with actual politics, to bring up “far-right” as a stereotypical bad thing, shows that it’s written by someone living in a bubble.
> Next thing you know, women will be wearing trousers and thinking they can vote.
what does this sentence in the article have to do with anything phone related? Women can wear whatever they and they've had the vote for over 100 years.
the article makes a decent point and then goes full crazy. Too bad.
Women have had the vote for ALMOST 100 years.
August 18, 1920
If you are going to inject overt bias into your articles and turn every piece into political argument fuel then don't call yourself a journalist.
I never dismissed the article. I have taken every opportunity to praise the article. Like you write elsewhere, the use of feminist analysis to examine smartphones is novel, very interesting, and praiseworthy. I completely agree with most of the article. I really don’t have much to add to it.
It is merely the throwaway snipe at left/right politics which I deemed unnecessary for the point the article is making (indeed, the article does not use it), and the presence of the snipe is uselessly, and counter-productively, divisive and polarizing.
I don't know if the article could've done without this, actually. The entire article seems to argue that, due to abusive interactions and power dynamics are mostly commonly dealt with in a feminist lens, the strategies of analysis of intersectional interactions under a feminist framework will provide a better context to generate workable, functioning logistics on redefining the human-phone relationship.
In that context, that gamergate's main targets of hate were women is relevant.
The rest of the article mostly uses misogynists as the antagonists in its analogy to phones, and that’s fine and makes sense using the reasoning present in the article. It was that random connection to left/right politics which was unnecessary, since the “misogynist” label would have worked just as well, as evidenced by the rest of the article, which doesn’t use the “far-right” connection at all; this is why I called it a “snipe”.
Politics is the alternative to war.
I fully believe that there are some evil people on the far left.
I'm not sure that there are any good people on the far right.
Unfortunately, feminist thought makes a lot of men uncomfortable and often ugly in their reactions. Just read the comments here.
On a more serious note - that we are overdepended on smartphones is common knowledge and not some epiphany. Ditto with them helping alienating from the others. The second part of the article is extremely cringe inducing. She is trying to cram every feminist buzzword and talking point ever.
The elephant in the article is so what?. What are we going to do about this? This is why so many people feel as though feminists are plagued with a victimhood complex - the only agent in the relationship she draws parallels to is the person. There is only one person to blame.
I understand the vast social consequences of not owning a phone - but I know plenty of people who have healthy relationships with their phones. Probably the one thing they have in common is that they don't blame others for their problems.