Smartphone Lock-Up
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Ready or Not: A Phone-Free Experience
Last week, I attended Hannah Gadsby’s stand-up comedy show (during which she stayed mostly seated due to a leg injury). I was excited to hear her new material, and I was not disappointed. She’s a pro, I’ll tell you that much. But I was also excited because of a new strategy she was implementing during her show—it was going to be a phone-free experience. And how was she going to attain that in a crowd of nearly 3,000 people? Well, she wasn’t going to simply say, “Please don’t use your cell phones” at the beginning of the show and leave it at that. I know from experience; that never works.
I remember using that line with my students when I was teaching college writing classes. I’d write my no-phone policy in caps lock, bold and underlined in the syllabus. I’d say it loud and clear on the first day of class in a no-bullshit tone. “No phones in class under any circumstances.” And yet, as soon as I was done uttering the sentence, I’d watch several students sneak a glance at their phone. The trill of notifications and vibrations would punctuate every class—and it would drive me nuts.
Eventually I wised up. Stern words were meaningless. What I needed was a box: a cell phone box. I found a cardboard box and painted those words colorfully on the sides. I started toting it to my classes and didn’t give students a choice. They protested at first but eventually they were trained to deposit their phones directly into the box before taking a seat. Occasionally, a phone in the box would peep up, trying to steal our attention, but all phones stayed in the box for the duration of the class.
At the end of the semester, I asked my students to take a survey about the cell phone box. I was surprised by the results. Besides one student who expressed deep rage about not being able to attend to important business on her phone during class, such as scheduling issues at her job at the local donut shop, most of the students had enjoyed the experience. Several students even thanked me for giving them this time—the only 90 minutes of their day when they wouldn’t be captive hostages to the whims of their smartphone. I was shocked and somewhat saddened when one student confessed that this phone-free experience had lessened the anxiety that she dealt with on a regular basis.
At her comedy show, Hannah Gadsby deployed her version of the cell phone box. It was outlined clearly in the show description; attendees would be asked to put their cell phones and smartwatches into a pouch that would remain locked throughout the show. The pouches are called “Yondr” and they’ve been used in all types of settings, from Broadway performances to middle school classrooms.
After purchasing the tickets, I got an email with standard event details and more information about the Yondr cases. Then I got another email two days before the show with the words “HANNAH GADSBY WILL BE A PHONE-FREE EVENT” in the subject line. And if that wasn’t enough, on the day of the show, I received a text with another reminder: “Print your tickets at home. Keep your phone in your car.”
In the email that was entirely dedicated to the phone-free aspect of the show, they included an FAQ. What is a phone-free show? How does it work?
They offered this explanation: “At a phone-free show, artists and audiences can enjoy the performance in the moment and without distraction, creating a better experience for everyone.”
The pouches don’t do anything to your phone besides lock it up. If you forgot to turn off the ringer, then it would sound during the performance, and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it (although it’s a soft pouch so I suppose you could hit the button to silence the ringer once it went off). The phone remains in your possession throughout the show and there are designated “phone zones” outside the theater where you can unlock your pouch if you need to.
At the bottom, this message was written in bold: “Phone-free shows are more fun. Comedians are uninhibited. The audience is present. Everyone is swept up into a shared mood.”
It was clear from this level of (over)communication that Hannah Gadsby and the Yondr people know just how attached people are to their phones and how much discomfort this process was going to create for the masses. This wasn’t the kind of thing to spring on people; there might be an uprising! The insistence that “this will be fun, guys, I promise” speaks to the very real fact that there wasn’t going to be a lot of buy-in from their audience about being disconnected from their devices for two hours. People would need a lot of advance notice, reminders, information, not-so-subtle coaxing and overall handholding to feel that everything was going to be alright.
Dave Chappelle was the first comedian to use the Yondr cases at his shows, and I can completely understand the motivation. In my time as a teacher at the front of a classroom, I’ve experienced the frustration of not having the attention of the people sitting in front of you. As a comedian or any kind of performer, I can imagine how unnerving it must be to see your audience member’s faces lit up by their phones, their attention hijacked by something else, something more important than you.
For me, being without my phone for two hours wasn’t the end of the world. The friends I came with both left their phones in their cars without a second thought. But scanning online message boards, not everyone is excited about the Yondr cases, as you can imagine. Some Broadway musical fans wrote that they felt they were being infantilized or punished for other people’s bad behavior. The subtext was: they could control their relationship to their phone, even if others couldn’t. But is that really true? Who is truly in control here?
I go back to this phrase: “The audience is present.” Presence is what it’s all about. Giving one’s undivided attention to a person, a moment, an experience. Of course, your mind may be full of thoughts that take you out of the moment; that cannot be helped. But there has been scientific proof that the mere presence of a smartphone, even if it’s turned off, diminishes the quality of connection between two people. And there’s something simple that we can do about that.
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