While teaching history at a local independent school in 2007-08, I witnessed the sudden influx of cellphones (so-called smartphones) throughout my group of 65 adolescent students in grades 6, 7 and 8.

After retiring in 2016, today I realize I’ve now had 18 years to reflect on my students’ difficulties handling the then-dazzling technology, but also 18 years to ponder whether I should obtain such a potent communications device myself.

Is 2025 finally the propitious moment to rejoin postmodern digital society?

It’s pretty obvious how digitally useful a cell would be for me … say, when I’m at the Toyota dealership and awaiting repairs to my Tacoma truck. In this case, I could accomplish some useful tasks on my portable phone.

(Or when stuck in snowy Bend, Oregon, and needing to summon an Uber to fetch food or get to the airport.) 

Yet, these few hours in the dealership’s waiting room could also be filled by me choosing to walk over to the urban trail in Old Town Goleta and amble for a couple of hours.

I would be out-of-doors, exercising, listening to the sounds of shore birds, enjoying natural light and chatting with the occasional other urban hiker.

Or, I could read part of a book I usually bring along, e.g. recently Nicholas Carr’s “Superbloom” about the corrosive impact of social media. I might scribble some notes in the journal that also reposes next to “Superbloom” in my black daypack.

As I consider the options, terms such as cellphone, iPhone, mobile, handy and smartphone swim around like leopard sharks circling their helpless prey. 

With a so-called “smartphone” in my pocket, the linear “left” side brain would  immediately begin to draw up endless to-do lists — stuff not to forget to finish, how to optimize my presentations, the endless memoir.

I could make a few quick business calls. I also might respond to calls from two of my sisters. These activities would morph seamlessly into six or nine calls as I sit there in the waiting room.

Too quickly I’d sink into incessant texting, and then the slippery slopes of the techno-spheres could already be squashing my initiative and eroding a sense of my own agency.

Wielding an iPhone, my attention would flare up spasmodically as messages would pop in and demand an action-response.

While I’ve always checked my son’s music career and gigs in Germany by using Facebook (usually accomplished on my big computer), with a cellphone I could do this more easily and while on the run.  

Yet, I’d be more and more linear-busy communicating online as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos silently collect users’ money from my presentations and content.

This gadget brings techno-optimism for the plutocrats but causes belt-tightening and fearmongering among the proles and leaves the lumpenproletariat squirming in their lower depths.

The porta-phone would bring me less time for hiking up into our local canyons.

The tiny computer — which only incidentally doubles as a portable telephone — would perform a zillion useful tasks if I get one, mostly to assist me in obtaining information quickly or ordering items (books).  

“Where are the three closest Mexican restaurants from my location in Bend?” for example.  Or, I could consult the United Airlines app that would have permitted us to immediately switch flights in San Francisco when our plane from Bend had been delayed for more than three hours.

The very plethora of fun (games) and necessary tasks one can manage intrigues the busy left hemisphere of the human brain.

I would enjoy checking sports results and baseball statistics. However, the more creative right hemisphere falls for Spotify and more music choices as well as the addiction of endless social media.

Back in 2007-08, I observed my adolescents, especially the girls, frantically trying to utilize the handy new tool — sort of like watching a 13-year-old trying to drive a Ferrari or a junior high school kid playing basketball with the Los Angeles Lakers.  

Controlling cell usage in class was a bit of a challenge, but I managed to quell the students’ wild enthusiasm.

I interviewed one thoughtful girl, let’s call her Samantha, and she was one of the most phone-hooked of all the students. I often caught her trying to use her phone, hiding it or setting it on a mosquito ring (I have good hearing) and other antics. 

“Why do you have to get back to your friends here at school so quickly? What is the vital message?” I naively asked her after yet another infraction.

“Oh, Mr. McCaslin, there isn’t really any message,” she explained. “I just need to show my loyalty and friendship by responding as quickly as possible.”  

Indeed, often it’s the quickness of the response, not the gravity of the message, that matters in social media interactions.

You respond quickly to show your deep friendship and loyalty, but to others you respond more slowly or not so much, and you simply ghost folks you no longer appreciate. Social communication through internet media often has this brutal character, lacking niceties and protocols, and thus promoting frequency of contact over depth of content.

I’m now realizing that I’ve been pondering intensified human communication and these smartphone challenges for almost 18 years. The benefits and the allure reek of both promise and peril.

Smartphones deprive us of more in-person human interactions and lead to fewer day hikes and outdoor immersions — and as humans urbanize even more, these chances to cruise about out-of-doors are shrinking.  

One wants to slow time down as he ages, not to speed it up or to feel constantly rushed — as we find we become digitally, online, or on the phone. Postmodernism gives us the feeling that time is speeding up and it soundlessly whizzes by us.

The online bombardment of messages is not only FAST and typically SOUNDLESS, it has proliferated exponentially so we could never respond to one-tenth of the messages even if we never slept. Carr writes that,

“We live today in a perpetual superbloom — not of flowers but of messages.
Our phones have turned us into human transceivers, nodes on a
communication network of unprecedented scope and speed …[But] the
optimism has turned to foreboding. We find ourselves facing a raft of
unintended consequences — all the social pathologies [are] on display … .” (p. 3)

When I retired from full-time teaching in 2016, I managed to elude the conventional edutech/digital demands on teachers and the newer devices students have to contend with.

The COVID-19 pandemic years enhanced the use of screen technologies (Zoom) to eliminate face-to-face teaching and communication. I know this was necessary in those scary times, but I have taught using Zoom, and it does not work well at all with younger students.

I wonder how the distractions and intensified time-sense are affecting us in deeper ways?

Do these portable communication devices make us smarter? Do they keep us off the trail? As a teacher, I remain more interested in understanding things through “depth of content” (reading) than via frequency of contact (ping… ping). 

4.1.1.

Nicholas Carr, “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart” (Norton 2025).