Chapter 10: Balance
10 Insights from the Super Connected Tour: Rebalancing Digital & Analogue Life. Tool Nine in the 'Super Connected Toolkit': Balance
“If you try to build a device that does all things for all people, it won’t do anything well”
- Martin Cooper, inventor of the mobile phone
What we learnt on the tour was how smartphones, social media and our portable digital diet is completely different for each individual. Each of us have a unique relationship to the digital realm. Big tech might like it’s products and platforms to be a ‘one fits all’ model, but like Martin Cooper said, that won’t do anything well.
Audiences often arrived at the Super Connected shows with the idea that they were entering a ‘tech-critical’ environment, but the truth is, we just wanted to have a conversation.
We just wanted to create a space where a conversation could happen without distractions. To support all the brilliant humans in the room and leave everything that was outside of the room, outside.
To me, a conversation is like jamming with a musician. You’re each communicating from your own life experience, and sharing what you know, but in the meeting of two different melodies, a third idea emerges. In that way, our collective experience creates a new experience that didn’t exist until we made that creative connection.
That’s exciting in music, and it’s exciting in a conversation too. But whether it’s music or just plain old conversation, that creative space exists in a fragile ecology.
When our phone pings in that ecology, anything we’ve been exploring, creating or birthing in that space, disintegrates. And if the other person’s phone suddenly pings, it becomes a signal to us that what we were talking about or sharing with that person isn’t as important to them as it is to us. This is a description of the majority of modern conversations when there is a smartphone present.
When you break it down, there’s no losses if you’re running a company that makes smartphones and social media platforms for a living. But there are huge minute to minute losses for the collective imagination of humanity.
Imagination if every digital interruption were swapped out for new born idea.
We love technology and all the incredible gifts it can give us. Technology rules.
But people who don’t profit from those rules need to be involved in writing them.
All we want to do with Super Connected is understand how we can hold on to the gifts that technology brings to our lives without it destabilising us, our relationships, our families, or our creative potential.
It can’t all revolve around each of us being a data extraction point.
Balance is actually quite a literal final tool. Either I am falling over, lopsided and weighed down with endless streams of digital media, or I am standing up straight and managing to navigate my way through life.
We want to find the balance between the digital self and the embodied self.
But also the balance that lies within us as individuals.
And that is what we will continue to do along the path of this exciting adventure we call Super Connected. We hope you can join us on the journey.
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
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