Disconnection Guide
Looking to restore the on/off-line balance in your life? Read our disconnection guide to redefine your relationship with your smartphone. Set healthy boundaries with your device and dig deeper into the negative side effects of screen overexposure.
WARNING!
The quick phone check here and there may seem harmless to some, but once observed at a macro-scale, the impact is impossible to ignore. Just two hours a day is equivalent to 2.3 days lost a month; extrapolate that to a whole year, and you’ve almost lost a whole a month (28 days) scrolling your life away. It is depressing to witness humans hand over their one life to technology corporations in exchange for a negatively impacted mental and physical health.
Despite their incredibly helpful features, we must think about how these devices can become more harmful than good. When is enough, enough? Children are losing their childhoods, politics are polarising, and social structures are shattering. Corporations have stolen our time with these addictive platforms, and all we got was targeted ads.
Smartphones are here to stay, but we can change how we perceive them. We need to relabel these objects and treat them as the danger that they are. Let’s be as wary of them as we are about cigarettes, guns, or alcohol. Our guide aims to help you reframe your relationship with your phone, and reap their benefits without their endless list of negative side effects.
TURN YOUR SMARTPHONE INTO A DUMBPHONE
Our goal is not to demonize phones, but to set healthy boundaries that help lessen their destructive properties. Follow the steps below if you are interested in keeping all the positive utility benefits of phones without the temptation from the negative time-robbing apps. We recognise that unplugging straight away may be too shocking to some, so we’ve broken down this strategy into various stages, to be followed at the pace that is most comfortable for you.
LEVEL ONE: NOTIFICATIONS, OFF! Make it a habit to keep your smartphone in ‘airplane’ or ‘do not disturb mode.’ You decide when you want to be contacted. There is no rule that says you must pick up or answer a text right away. Unless you’re at work, turn those notifications off.
LEVEL TWO: EMAIL AND SOCIAL MEDIA DETOX Rank your social media and messaging apps from most to least used, and start deleting them one at a time. Make them only accessible on a desktop computer (or alternative, as long as it’s not on your phone), so that you can draw the spatial boundary with these apps. Make it inconvenient for you to access them so that eventually you’ll lose the need to do so. After these apps are gone from your phone, set aside a few time periods where you are allowed to check your socials somewhere else. Slowly increase these intervals until you’re checking your platforms once or twice a week. You’ll be surprised how much more time you seem to have in a day.
LEVEL THREE: SURF NO MORE Unless your phone is your only technological device, there is no real need to have an internet browser on your phone. At least, not on your ‘home page,’ tempting you to surf the web as soon as you unlock your screen. After deleting social media apps from your phone, there will be the temptation to enter your socials though your internet browser, canceling out the effectiveness of the prior strategy.
LEVEL FOUR: CANCEL THE E-CARDS Not only is it incredibly unsafe to store your banking information on your phone, but deleting these will ensure that you don’t fall into the phone trap before or after you’ve made your payment with the cashier. Cultivate a relationship with the people that serve and are around you. In the long run, these small, casual interactions between people are what lead to a tighter knit community.
LEVEL FIVE: BACK TO BLACK AND WHITE It’s impossible to not be hypnotized by the ultra-high quality imagery displayed on smartphones. By turning your display to grayscale, your brain will not receive the same addictive dopamine hit that a bright red heart on your Instagram feed may provide.
LOOKING FOR A MORE DETAILED PLAN? Check out this link, produced by the same authors of the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma:
TRIGGERS AND WHAT TO DO INSTEAD
Technology companies hire the best researchers to test how their platforms engage their userbase, and to find the most efficient way to get their attention for as long as possible. Similarly to Pavlov’s dogs, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and friends have trained our brains to associate certain actions with phone usage. Need a dopamine hit? Post a picture on Instagram story and wait for a few replies. Feeling sad, bored, hungry, tired, or lonely? Scroll through a few Reddit forums to find people who are going through similar situations.
In the following table, our team has identified a few triggers for smartphone users, and paired them with alternatives. This information was sourced from scientific articles, as well as personal accounts from anonymous online forums of self-declared phone addicts. We encourage you to try some of these strategies out, and report back if you notice any change in your behaviour towards your device.
CREATE NO-GO ZONES
You’re welcome to inquire on any of our capsules for at-home or office installation, but in the meantime, it’s important to set physical boundaries with your smartphone. The power of your phone lies in its ability to follow you everywhere. This means that it becomes too easy to bring them to bedroom, dinner table, sofa, or even the toilet.
By drawing the line on where these devices are allowed to be used, the risk of mindlessly scrolling is minimised. For example, if you happen to get a notification while sitting on the sofa, then stand up to respond to it. Make it uncomfortable enough to use your device in order to remain aware of your time using it. Eventually you won’t want to be standing anymore, and you’ll turn off your phone and sit back on the sofa to watch your movie.
If you’d like to go one step further, dedicate a corner of your household to self-restoration, preservation, and meditation. Make it sensory with soft textures, relaxing aromas, and gentle music, and lay in the space for at least five minutes a day. Only five minutes, while keeping your eyes closed, will completely shift your outlook for the rest of your day. This time allows your brain to reboot and self-reflect, encouraging you to reach your full potential.
BECOME (ALMOST) DIGITALLY INVISIBLE
Here are a few ways you can protect your identity while you are surfing the web.
SEARCH ENGINES Don’t just ‘Google it;’ reconsider your search engine choice. We recommend DuckDuckGo for their no logs policy, meaning that they don’t keep track or sell your activity to others.
INSTALL A VPN ON YOUR PHONE (Virtual Private Network), allow you to disappear through encrypted networks, making it much more diffcult for third parties to recognise who you are, target to you, or steal your data.
EMF-BLOCKING PHONE CASE EMF-(electro-magnetic-frequency) blocking phone cases completely stop all 3G+ signals, bluetooth connections, and radio active waves emitted from your phone. It’s a quick and easy way to be untraceable and uncontactable when out and about. Available with a donation.
RECONSIDER YOUR BROWSER Chrome, most people’s favourite internet browser, is owned by Google. This means that whatever website you browse, Google knows about it. Over time, these corporations build profiles on your internet behaviour, which helps make their platforms more addictive/ lucrative. An alternative that we recommend is Brave. With the added UBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and DuckDuckGo Privacy extensions, you’ll make it significantly harder for anyone to monitor your internet use.
ENCRYPTED MESSAGING Certain messaging apps like Signal advertise end-to-end encryption, yet still need a phone number to sign up to their services. Whatsapp promised a similar feature when they were founded, but they were bought by Facebook by 2014, so we would remain wary of their intentions.
CRYPTOCURRENCY In the past few years, cryptocurrency has had an enormous growth in value, even influencing countries to use it as their standard currency. However, not all cryptocurrencies should be considered untraceable. Bitcoin, for example, is fairly easy to trace down to the end user. Monero, Zcash, and PVIX, are continuously recommended as the top three anonymous cryptocurrency options, for users that value their prioritse privacy when performing online transactions.
ABSTINENCE The only way to become digitally invisible is to not use the internet at all. All messages you write, money you spend, or websites you search are traceable back to you if enough effort is put into uncovering this information. Our current cyber world does not allow for private digital invisibility, which is another driver that motivates our project purpose. Here are a few ways you can protect your identity while you are surfing the web.
READING LIST
Don't take our word for it. In case you are looking to learn more about the negative effects of smartphones on your health, society, and the environment, we welcome you to read the following texts. These have inspired us during our project development, and we hope they provide similar joy to you too:
BLUE ZONES, by DAN BUETHNER In his book, Buethner labels certain regions across the globe where life expectancy is longest. He argues that life longevity is closely correlated to the built environment, and its power to serendipitous connections. His text inspired our idea to create ‘no-wi-fi zones’ with the intention of improving people’s quality of life through the use of positively recharging space.
THE BIG DISCONNECT, by GILES SLADE Slade analyzes the relationship between man and social media, and its ties to loneliness. He notes how machine intimacy is replacing human intimacy, and suggests interpersonal strategies that build a sense of community and acceptance.
THREE PIECES OF GLASS, by ERIC O. JACOBSEN Similarly to The Big Disconnect, this book looks into how three pieces of glass - the car windshield, TV, and smartphone - are attributing to the loneliness epidemic by encouraging physical isolation. In response, the author offers strategies to raise self-awareness and promotes a slower, more intentional philosophy of life.
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THE POWER OF OFF, BY NANCY COLLIER Collier investigates the tools social media corporations use to keep their audiences hooked to their platforms, and shares mindfulness practices to take back control of their life.
OFF. YOUR DIGITAL DETOX FOR A BETTER LIFE, BY TANYA GOODING A guide to re-establishing the boundaries with smartphones. Gooding provides ways to disconnect, and has a chapter on looking up, inspiring the title of our project.
HOW TO DO NOTHING, BY JENNY ODELL A political manifesto against the capitalist narrative of efficiency and production. This text argues that doing nothing is a form of resistance against the status quo, and provides an action plan to reclaim the time wasted maintaining an ever-presence on social media.
THE GREAT GOOD PLACE, BY RAY OLDENBURG Oldenburg promotes the establishment of more ‘third places,’ or community-driven locations where people can gather between work and home. He claims these spaces are at the grassroots of democracy, and that they are essential for mental health. Similarly, our goal is to promote a new form of third place; the no-wi-fi place.
POST PHONE SALUTATION
You’ll notice that our capsules are designed after a few pilates and yoga positions that directly tackle the physical consequences of smarphone overuse. We recognise that not everyone can afford to keep a capsule in their home, so we’ve illustrated a few positions you can do to restore your body from any aches caused by your phone, wherever you are. Feel free to perform the whole sequence or in parts, holding each position for at least five long breaths.
