#becon

(½) a peice for the @thecandlenightszone gift exchange for @dittorb on Instagram!

Duck and Minerva puzzling over how to free a frozen Beacon with Indred very Cold

As I walk and drive around Los Angeles, I am struck by how many people I see looking at their phone. On every block there’s usually a couple of people walking along looking at their phones. In a plaza, where people are sitting, sometimes nearly everyone is looking at their phone. In my experience, when I am looking at my phone, I am nearly completely unaware of my surroundings. I am very much immersed in the reality of the phone., and disconnected from the reality of the world around me. I tend to feel lonely and sad when I’m disconnected from the world around me, I feel happier when I’m connected to people and experience of this world. Plenty has been written about the greater the prevalence of smart phones, the greater the prevalence of depression. Blah blah blah, whatever. Talking to somebody while they are using their phone is always a drag.

There are ways in which the phone does connect us more and increases our level of communication. It’s just that there are so many other ways that it disrupts and disconnects us from each other. So what if there’s just a better way to use the phone? To use it in such a way that all of the ways it connects us are emphasized, and all of the ways it separates us from each other are minimized. It would basically be a way of using the phone that fosters more connection and better communication.

The more suited a tool is to the job, the better job that tool will do. If we define the job of our phone as enhancing communication and connection, then we ask ourselves what aspects of the phone are helpful in this respect?

So I am proposing an investigation of the phone. I expect to find and define a set of apps, settings, and actions that will increase the usefulness of a phone in terms of human connection, and remove or minimize the aspects that are harmful to connection. This would be an evolving set, and one that is open to discussion, fluid, and of course it is different things to different people.

Ultimately, it is a radical pairing down of the phone’s range of possibile uses in order to sharply focus it’s functionality toward realizing meaningful connection.

So, I’m going to try some things with my phone and I’ll let you know. I’ve got some ideas, and maybe this will be really good.