What terrifies me about phone noise and phone addiction is how accepted it is. When I first told everyone I was getting rid of my social media they genuinely thought I was insane.
you wrote your thesis on the early modern Nightmare and the painting?! That's so cool!! Now, everytime I see it, I can't stop thinking at when they used it via Bing search to depict what the demon baby could have been in Twilight XD
My thesis was on sleep paralysis, sexuality, and the supernatural in early modern Europe! Fuseli fell outside my time period but was always a touch stone. Sometimes I wonder about sharing it on here but obviously it’s academic (and also from 3-4 years ago now!)
It would be so interesting!!!! I wrote my first one on the aesthetic concept of the Japanese ‘iki’, and the second one on beauty. Researching such topics was such a decadent pleasure
still thinking about this essay a week later. turns out i have a lot i need to process and get off my chest about my phone addiction as well, coming soon!! thank you for providing such rich material to engage with!
What feels most dangerous in what you’re describing is dissolution, beyond distraction. Phone noise doesn’t just splinter attention, it gradually undoes form: the form of thought, of motivation, of embodied presence.
What begins as static becomes atmosphere. Desire slips into impulse. Structure gives way to drift. The self stops being legible even to itself.
Could that be the deeper consequence of phone time, a drift into formlessness rather than disconnection, where the body, attention, and identity lose the pressure to cohere?
I What's disturbing, to me, about the "phone noise" is that nobody, really, actually likes looking at it! Everyone knows they would rather be watching a movie, going for a walk, or talking to a friend. It reveals--perhaps as all addictions do--the disjunction between "I" that actually is, and the story we tell ourselves about who that "I" is.
I am so haunted by Sheila Heti's observation, in Pure Colour, that she has spent more time looking at websites (Perfect! not her phone, not screens, but websites!) than at the sky.
"If she gathered together the amount of time she spent looking at websites, and the amount of time she spent looking at the sky, then her life was clearly answering which was the more valuable, for her...She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.”
i hate myself everytime i grab my phone and rot instead of doing the things that i need to be doing like reading an article, studying or simply being a functional adult
My parents didn’t let me have a device until I had finished high school. At the time, I was slightly resentful because of this. However, after 4 years a slave, I look back to those years with longing, for I have not lived fully since then.
In the Naked Sun detective Baley goes to the planet Solaria to investigate a murder. Solarian society is fully automated. That should be a paradise but the humans don’t like personal contact and prefer viewing over holograms. The conclusion to the book is Solaria is not a threat to Earth because they lost community and are slowly losing their humanity and are becoming stagnant. This seems the world we are heading towards
What terrifies me about phone noise and phone addiction is how accepted it is. When I first told everyone I was getting rid of my social media they genuinely thought I was insane.
"not a lack of willpower but a numbness" -- THIS is the perfect articulation of phone noise and what it does to you.
Thank you.
really brilliant
you wrote your thesis on the early modern Nightmare and the painting?! That's so cool!! Now, everytime I see it, I can't stop thinking at when they used it via Bing search to depict what the demon baby could have been in Twilight XD
My thesis was on sleep paralysis, sexuality, and the supernatural in early modern Europe! Fuseli fell outside my time period but was always a touch stone. Sometimes I wonder about sharing it on here but obviously it’s academic (and also from 3-4 years ago now!)
It would be so interesting!!!! I wrote my first one on the aesthetic concept of the Japanese ‘iki’, and the second one on beauty. Researching such topics was such a decadent pleasure
what this is sooo scary and weird
Thank you for this. It's wonderful.
this is perfection
🥹💓
this is so so so good & so masterfully explored
thank you Evie! 💕
still thinking about this essay a week later. turns out i have a lot i need to process and get off my chest about my phone addiction as well, coming soon!! thank you for providing such rich material to engage with!
What feels most dangerous in what you’re describing is dissolution, beyond distraction. Phone noise doesn’t just splinter attention, it gradually undoes form: the form of thought, of motivation, of embodied presence.
What begins as static becomes atmosphere. Desire slips into impulse. Structure gives way to drift. The self stops being legible even to itself.
Could that be the deeper consequence of phone time, a drift into formlessness rather than disconnection, where the body, attention, and identity lose the pressure to cohere?
I What's disturbing, to me, about the "phone noise" is that nobody, really, actually likes looking at it! Everyone knows they would rather be watching a movie, going for a walk, or talking to a friend. It reveals--perhaps as all addictions do--the disjunction between "I" that actually is, and the story we tell ourselves about who that "I" is.
I am so haunted by Sheila Heti's observation, in Pure Colour, that she has spent more time looking at websites (Perfect! not her phone, not screens, but websites!) than at the sky.
"If she gathered together the amount of time she spent looking at websites, and the amount of time she spent looking at the sky, then her life was clearly answering which was the more valuable, for her...She doesn’t know why she spent so much of her life thinking about such trivial things, or looking at websites, when just outside her window there was a sky that was not trivial.”
i hate myself everytime i grab my phone and rot instead of doing the things that i need to be doing like reading an article, studying or simply being a functional adult
So, so good.
Great article, thank you.
My parents didn’t let me have a device until I had finished high school. At the time, I was slightly resentful because of this. However, after 4 years a slave, I look back to those years with longing, for I have not lived fully since then.
In the Naked Sun detective Baley goes to the planet Solaria to investigate a murder. Solarian society is fully automated. That should be a paradise but the humans don’t like personal contact and prefer viewing over holograms. The conclusion to the book is Solaria is not a threat to Earth because they lost community and are slowly losing their humanity and are becoming stagnant. This seems the world we are heading towards