Chapter 1: Screenless Socials
10 Insights from the Super Connected Tour: Rebalancing Digital & Analogue Life. Tool One in the 'Super Connected Toolkit': Screenless Socials
“These days, being connected depends not on our distance from each other but from available communications technology. Most of the time, we carry that technology with us. In fact, being alone can start to seem like a precondition for being together because it is easier to communicate if you can focus, without interruption, on your screen. In this new regime, a train station (like an airport, a café, or a park) is no longer a communal space but a place of social collection: people come together but do not speak to each other”
– Sherry Turkle, Alone Together
Sherry’s book ‘Alone Together’ kickstarted me to write the songs of Super Connected. By the time Kate and I began developing the live shows, we both took this quote from Sherry Turkle to heart. For our first tour, turning a place of social collection back into a communal space was as integral as any other part of the production.
After Kate graduated at The Pacifica Institute for Dream Tending, her passion for bringing people together to help them make their own ‘conversation collage’ in a real listening environment, influenced her development of Super Connected live. In making these ideas an integrated part of the event, we quickly found out we weren’t the only ones wondering if our digital lives were out of control.
“Whoever you speak to about the themes of digital dependency in Super Connected, everyone has their own experience and their own story to tell” - Kate Alderton
There’s been a lot of talk about ‘gig etiquette’ in the UK - audiences not investing in the present moment at music concerts. We often put screens between ourselves and what’s on stage. It’s understandable. We’re all carrying around the entire universe in our pockets and it’s hard to switch off. Unless we change together, at the same time.
We explored this with the first tour of Super Connected.
Kate says: "We learnt in rehearsals that it was impossible for an audience to simultaneously watch a live performer sing in ‘gig-style’ and pay attention to a film. It's the epitome of attention distraction, which is exactly what Super Connected is trying to challenge. Inviting the audience to put their phones in pouches was originally intended to help them experience the show, undistracted. But in the Screenless Socials, it became clear to all of us how it was in fact a much more powerful ritual of collective action that went beyond a night of great entertainment.”
As author and MIT professor Sherry Turkle successfully argues in her seminal book ‘Alone Together: why we expect more from technology and less from each other’, we feel so self-sufficient with our phone, that it’s become natural not to seek out another human.
Kate and I wanted to create a more balanced experience in our own lives when it came to screen-time. I had just switched to the Light Phone, so I was only communicating with our team on the tour with a handful of contacts I had added to my Light Phone.
We planned to go from city to city inviting audiences to join us by being less on screens and more with each other. So we came up with Screenless Socials.
Super Connected began life as an album, before quickly developing into a feature film. But the live shows (that incorporate both), have become a sort of appetiser and facilitator of a rare chance for people to get together, in a public space, without screens.
“What the experience of Super Connected does is create a fresh perspective. It helps us see what’s happening to us. At least then, at the end of the show, when we finally free our phones from their pouches, we’re viscerally aware of what happens to us when our devices herald each new connection with a ping.” - Jonathan Harris, Church of Burn
Screenless Socials have been more successful than we imagined and we’ve now been asked to bring them into some schools, along with the live show and film.
I’m now interrupting this blog because…it’s relevant.
The whole Substack website just went down for an hour. I was worried as I’ve written a lot and was nervous I may have lost it. Luckily not, but it has made me think that this is why it might not be a bad idea to reinvest in some of our offline activities.
I say this after a week of IT systems crashing all over the world, causing chaos for many individuals, families and businesses. Perhaps it’s not helpful to get hysterical about it, but it’s no bad thing to give our analogue lives a good polish now and again.
In the meantime, we’re planning towards the next tour of Super Connected, and we announce first through our mailing list, so if you’d like to come along, do join us.
Musician and Filmmaker Tim Arnold has researched screen addiction and social media’s effects on mental health since 2017, culminating in the critically acclaimed album, film and theatre show, Super Connected - Nihal Arthanayake, BBC 5 LIVE
Listen to the album here and be among the first to see the film by signing up here.