#SmartphoneFree: Mind-Forged Manacles

Please forgive me if this comes across as crass, but I'm sure many of you will know what I mean: one of the places you really miss having a smartphone is when you're 'in the bathroom'. I suppose, in all honesty, some of us perhaps spend more time in there than we really need to because of our smartphones.

One of the principles in Cal Newport's book 'Digital Minimalism' (which I discovered 5 months after getting rid of my smartphone) is that when you complete a digital declutter you should replace your digital activities with more meaningful non-digital activities.

I'd already worked this out - in fact, I'd thought of so many things to do in all the time I was going to save by not having a smartphone that I don't have enough time to do all of them - and knew that having something different to read during moments of downtime was going to be a must.

I'd already decided that poetry was something I wanted to get into a bit more and so my copy of 'How Poems Work' by Robert Gullifer and Matthew Jenkinson  made its way onto the windowsill in our bathroom. In this book there are 100 poems, each at around a page long, which are all partnered with another page's worth of brief analysis of the meaning of the poem and the techniques used. I've learned loads about poem structures, literary movements, rhyme schemes and so on, and have absolutely loved getting to know some brilliant and emotive poems.

Many of the poems have struck me for different reasons, but one line in 'London' by William Blake belongs here on this blog:

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

With this line Blake refers to the 'mental imprisonment of London's inhabitants'. Blake was writing in the time of revolution - industrial, American, French - but I see his words bearing relevance during today's digital revolution.

As Newport discusses, an oft-given reason for continued overuse of social media and digital devices is that they are useful and that life is difficult without them. This is an example of mind-forged manacles. We tell ourselves that the scant positive gains we get somehow outweigh the negative consequences of our screen addictions. And, actually, this is exactly what the tech companies want - they deliberately design their products to convince us that life is impossible without them.

One more reflection on 'How Poems Work': I always rejoice in intertextuality and I found a great example in three of the books I've read recently or am currently reading. In 'The Way Home', Mark Boyle (the cover of his book alone speaks to me) cites Henry David Thoreau as an influence, particularly his book 'Walden'. Cal Newport, in 'Digital Minimalism' also references and quotes Thoreau:

'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. They honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up on our prejudices.'

In 'How Poems Work' I not only found Thoreau's 'The Summer Rain' but also Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem 'Walden' about his area of woodland where Thoreau lived in a cabin for two years, two months and two days. Both poems speak of nature's superiority over the man-made although perhaps Thoreau takes it too far when he almost denounces the reading of books - I will certainly be continuing to enjoy the pleasure of reading real paper pages over the shining screen of my smartphone.

Booklist:

The Way Home: Tales From A Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle (Oneworld Publications)
How Poems Work by Robert Gullifer & Matthew Jenkinson (John Catt Educational Ltd)
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (Penguin)