Is there anything better than an evening sitting around the table with friends? A little food, a little drink and there is no life problem that cannot be solved – or at least put into perspective, and that’s half the battle. Unfortunately, more and more uninvited guests are sitting at my kitchen table. And then the rude ones too – they don’t pay attention to the other guests, don’t pick up on the conversation and fish for attention all the time. “Shall I put up a chair for your phone?” I never say it out loud, of course, but I think I do sometimes.
When a telephone is exposed on the table, I dare to ask on my less tolerant days to turn the screen down. And if I have a really bad day, I sometimes dare to ask if the telephone can be out of sight (I mean: if there is something really urgent, say a child who is at the door without a key, you can still call the old-fashioned way. become, right?).
Is it just me that even someone else’s phone seems to occupy a part of my brain, even when nothing happens on it? With a telephone on the table, I have the feeling that something is faltering, that the company is on standby, wary of incoming messages. Or even worse: check the phone at the first breakdown of the conversation to quickly check the phone, if necessary even to scroll through Facebook or Linkedin. As a result, there is less listening and the conversation remains more on the surface – you will only just open your heart when a Messenger message comes in. Even if the recipient ignores the message, the mood is momentarily broken.
Rule of three
Yet it seems gradually normalized for our phones to slide along at the table. Bringing your smartphone and/or laptop to meetings has become the norm. And no one looks up from a telephone more or less on social occasions. Quickly sending a message or checking Facebook has become acceptable, especially in larger groups where the informal ‘rule of 3’ applies: as long as at least two people listen to who is talking, you can give yourself a smartphone break at the table.
During fieldwork in the student restaurant, UGent researchers established that a telephone was brought out in 61 of the hundred conversations. ‘That’s quite a lot, but the intensity and duration differed greatly,’ says Mariek Vanden Abeele, professor of digital culture at Ghent University and initiator of the citizen research On/Off. ‘In well a third of the cases, the phone was used socially – to look up something that came up or show pictures.’ The observations lasted ten minutes.
Sherry Turkle, initiator of the research project on technology & self at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been concerned for years about the quality of our conversations. She wrote about it in her book, among other things Reclaiming conversation (2017). She also suspects that our capacity for empathy has been declining since the arrival of the smartphone – despite all social media. 75 minutes of the more than three hours we spend on our smartphone on average every day, we spend on social media and chat apps (‘and therefore in the ecosystem of Meta’, Vanden Abeele added delicately when she told me).
The question is: do we actually feel more connected to each other as a result? Can you build relationships through posts and messages? That is one of the major research themes of the citizen project On/Off, which Ghent University and this newspaper are launching together. I am very curious about the results, and in the meantime I am also very curious how you experience that. Under what circumstances do you leave your phone aside? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the smartphone in your social life? Do you have agreements about this with friends, relatives, partner(s)? All your experiences are welcome at [email protected].
Zeitgeist. De Standaard focuses on in-depth journalistic research into what determines and turns our lives upside down, across generations and borders. Because understanding the issues of the day starts with grasping the zeitgeist.