Are You Really Addicted to Your Phone??

Hello to everyone who is currently reading this blog post!! It has felt like forever! NOT! I am back again to share the newest things I have been learning in class. If you have read my last post, you will see that we talked about how addicted people are to their phones and discussed Zomorodi's view on why it is their fault. We also talked about Williams' thoughts on why he believes tech companies are responsible for people becoming addicted. But this time around, we discussed Rob Walker's views, which are exactly the same as Manoush Zomorodi's views. To understand his perspective, I completed one last challenge. Then, my whole class had to create a social media/phone challenge that pushes people to think more like James Williams and less like Zomorodi and Walker.

For the last challenge I had to complete, I had to choose between five different challenges. The five challenges came from Walker's book, The Art of Noticing. The first challenge from this selection is creating an auditory inventory. The instructions for this were to note all the sounds you heard at a certain time and write them down. The second challenge was to sketch a room we were just in. We were to survey the room we were currently in, walk into a different room, and sketch the room with as much detail as we could remember. The third challenge was to look out a window for ten minutes. You find a window you normally don't take time to look out of and look for three things you have not noticed before or describe what you are seeing. The fourth challenge was to repeat your point of view. You would find somewhere to sit and would sit there everyday for fifteen minutes and watch the people who passed by. This challenge was made for people to realize that not everything is the "same view" after all. The final challenge that my class could choose from was the take a color walk challenge. For this test, you had to take an hour-long walk and answer five questions. The five questions that you were asked are:

1. What are the colors that you become aware of first?
2. What are the colors that reveal themselves more slowly?
3. What colors do you observe that you did not expect?
4. What color relationships do you notice?
5.  Do colors appear to change over time?    

The challenge I chose to attempt was the sketch a room challenge. I thought this challenge would be fun to attempt compared to the other ones. If I am being honest, I felt like this challenge was more of a memory challenge instead of an attention challenge. I feel like I was just testing how well I could remember details about my own room that I stay in everyday and how well I could draw. (Which is not very good because I still can not draw to save my life.) So basically, I think I did very well in this challenge because I was able to draw all the major details of my room and include a lot more little details than I thought I was going to be able to include.

After a week of discussing the three theorists, talking about all the different challenges my classmates completed and the results of those challenges, we started to discuss our next presentation. Like I have mentioned before, our goal was to create our own social media challenge that would push people to think more in terms of James Williams and his thoughts about how companies are forcing us to become addicted to our technology, instead of Manoush Zomorodi and Rob Walker's belief that people become addicted because of themselves. So I created a challenge that combined being active on your phone while noticing the differences around you. This challenge is inspired by when I was hanging out with my friend. We were sitting in my car, scrolling through TikTok. When we looked up from our scrolling, we saw two things that we thought were hilarious. We saw two guys come up to an art installation and one of them started climbing up the art installation. The guy on top of the installation started posing in different ways while his friend took pictures of him at the top. When we shifted our gaze, we saw a staff member walking across the grass with a plastic bag and cardboard box of food. As we kept watching, we saw him start to run.  We then noticed that a hawk was following him pretty closely. That's when we realized that there was a hawks nest in one of the trees and that the hawk was probably feeling a little territorial. So the challenge I created works like this:

1. Find a place you can "people watch" (ex. park or a parking lot)
2. Note what is happening and what you can see 
3. Find something you can do on your phone
4. Look down at your phone for about five minutes, then look back up
5. Note what has changed from the last time you looked up

I think this challenge helps people think in terms of Williams' because it's not making people feel bad about being on their phone. I think that you can learn a lot from being on your phone. You can learn new recipes to try, about what's going on in the world around us, or what's happening in the lives of your friends you haven't seen in a while. By being on your phone and looking up every once in a while, you can learn new things.

That's all I have for you this time! I'll see you next time for my last blog post on here! See you next time!