CELLPHONE CHRONICLES
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Around the same time, Jonathan Haidt published a ground-breaking book that quickly became a New York Times bestseller entitled The Anxious Generation, about Gen Z youth (born after 1995) who have never experienced life without phones and social media.
Anne used some quotations from Haidt’s book, and from Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation, interspersed with her whimsical, ironic, funny, thought-provoking sculptures, which she made by filling cellphone frames with entirely new material.
When Haidt’s book was first published, stencils appeared on the sidewalk on Columbus Avenue in North Beach next to the children’s playground, urging that we ban cellphones in schools, prohibit social media before age 16, stop telling children to “stay safe,” and instead encourage them to get outside, take risks, and develop responsibility by experiencing the real world.
When I heard about the stencils, I ran over and took pictures, a couple of which are in The Book of Cells, along with excerpts from my first Semaphore cellphone column (Fall 2023 issue)
Artists Collaborate on a New Book
by Judy Irving
The Book of Cells – Artists Respond to Cellphone Mania is a new book by Anne Whiteside and seven other Bay Area women artists that we hope to publish soon.
I first met Anne at the Live Worms Gallery on Grant Avenue at her
show of cellphone sculptures, and I was hooked.
Artists’ Backgrounds
After a lifetime of teaching at City College, Anne Whiteside got a Ph.D. in Educational Linguistics and taught Maya-speakers in Yucatan. As an artist, she works on multimedia sculpture, painting, and encaustic (painting with hot wax).
Here are some excerpts from her Artist’s Statement, which show how she came to cellphones from a much older and slightly less addictive screen.
“I'm always trying to find ways to take back some of the imaginative space occupied by technology. I realized, years ago, that television is a kind of surrogate fire. We sit around in the evening looking at this glowing thing, very ancient in our primitive brain.
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“Corporations have taken advantage of this to invade our private spaces and sell us unnecessary things. Now it's cell phones that occupy our minds, hands, and loving gaze. With every click, we sell a piece of ourselves. Can we transform these beautifully-designed but cold objects into something warm and tactile, concrete?
“The older I get, the closer I feel to the cellularity in plants; we all have cell structures. For my first phone I made a screen out of wood with a transfer print of a fern and nonsense text on it. I’m drawn to European Dada artists, who, in response to the horrors of WWI, made nonsense images. In a world gone mad, these artists found it liberating to point out absurdity, to poke fun at the status quo.
“Now we're in another kind of mess, sucked into a virtual reality that isolates us and deprives us of touch and smell. So I made phones out of tactile stuff like fur and plaster, which has something very human about it. I also played around with tech words like ‘icon,’ ‘window,’ ‘scroll,’ words that used to mean other things, and with ‘texting’ as a verb. Inspired by jazz, I invited a group of artists to improvise on their own themes.”
The other artists who contributed photos, facts, and sculptures to The Book of Cells are all friends of Anne’s: Kim Collet works with watercolor, sculpture, calligraphy, and mosaic. Ellen Rosenthal is a photographer and Spanish interpreter, who also plays the jazz bass. Dianne Platner paints portraits and landscapes, builds site specific installations, and makes books. Consuelo Faust Anderson is a dancer and choreographer and is the founder of Rhythm & Motion. Sheila Balter is an actor, director, and core company member of Word for Word Performing Arts Company. Brooke Holve works with calligraphy, printmaking, digital technology, and poetry. And I’m a documentary filmmaker. Here are some examples of how we all “respond to cellphone mania.” Enjoy!
PS: I visited Kells, Ireland in late June to screen Wild Parrots and Cold Refuge at the Hinterland Festival and while there, paid a visit to the Book of Kells, the first “illuminated manuscript,” referenced in
the Book of Cells. Unfortunately for me, the audio tour of the exhibit was only accessible via cell phone!
TOP
Folks Who Live
without Cell phones
Working without a Cell Phone
Matthew Weimer
If you’ve ever been to Café Jacqueline in San Francisco, you’d probably recognize Matthew Weimer, a longtime waiter who for many years sported a handlebar mustache. Matt, like me, has never had a cellphone, not even a flip phone. I discovered in my research that this is rare; most of my respondents have a flip phone, and some even have a smartphone, but they consciously restrict its usage.
Matt has seen a steady erosion in social skills at the café. “While they’re waiting for their souffles, they don’t talk to each other, they look at their phones. Clients need to be reminded often that the chef does not want her picture taken. I have caught that bug myself and do not like to have my picture taken. No logic to it. More like the belief that your soul is somehow compromised in the process of being photographed.”
Teaching without a Cell Phone
by Walter Brents III
I've never had an iPhone. Humans seem to be entranced by externalized forms of their own consciousness. Telling stories is my way of working with the alienation of it all. I tell stories at a private elementary school in Berkeley and also do talks at Bird & Beckett Bookstore in San Francisco on such topics as Hannah Arendt, Kierkegaard, Ibn Arabi, and many others.
This drawing I did illustrates a story I tell to schoolchildren. It is about an abstract expressionist artist-cat who is a real person. A real person who tells stories. Although he cannot change into things, he tells stories of a cat who can: Tamarisk.
Tamarisk belongs to a desert magician. One night while the magician is studying an ancient book, Tamarisk steals into his costume chest. Whatever costume she crawls through, that animal she becomes. These costumes belong to the magician but not to Tamarisk. She takes them anyway, wearing them over a succession of 100 nights, having adventures connected to each one. As for Ovidian animal transformations, I have been approaching them in terms of a story from the Quileute people, salmon fishers of the Pacific Coast, who tell of Raven:
Back when animals were people and people were animals, Raven was walking
around on the beach one day. It was low tide. An old woman was digging clams nearby.
She was piling them on a mat farther up the beach. Raven thought, "How nice"
and stole those clams. He ate every one of them. The old woman looked at him
a long time as he ran away laughing, his belly swollen with stolen clams. Her eyes
glowed with red fire.
Raven did not know it, but he had been cursed, cursed to not be able to drink water.
Every stream, river, pond, puddle, even every moist leaf, all held their water from his lips,
drawing away their surfaces even as his mouth reached out to them. He did not know
what to do. Until he thought, "Trick her." He dressed up in the feathers of a bird.
He flew around. He hopped to a puddle, bent his bird-head to drink. "She can't
recognize me if I am a bird." Still, though, the waters receded. Eventually, Raven
flew a very long way to get beyond her power. When he finally got there, he said
to himself, "I have the feathers of a bird. I might as well just go ahead and be a bird."
Ever since then, Raven has been a bird.
Anyway, these are some of my analogic thoughts. I’m glad when I hear of people who are creatively responding to the technological onslaught on our fragile human consciousness.
Traveling without a Cell Phone
by Judy Irving
New York City
I’m glad I can walk—not drive—while I’m in the City, especially through Central Park to the theater where Wild Parrots will screen on the Upper West Side. Before the screening I plan to have coffee with my nephew Adam. In an odd twist, the coffee shop he suggests has two locations on East 80th Street, with another storefront between them. I arrive walking from the east and wait at the eastern location; Adam arrives from the west and waits at the western location.
Later, he paces back and forth on the sidewalk outside, sending me texts that I don’t get, and when I finally borrow someone else’s phone and go outside to call him, there he is! We’ve wasted about half an hour. From now on, I know I must check lobbies, sidewalks, and other possible places where my “date” might be waiting.
Heading Home: At the airport I sign up for standby on an earlier flight to San Francisco. “Check the United app—standbys will get a text.” I don’t have the app so plan to wait at the gate and find out by speaking to a human being. Meanwhile I check out a nearby restaurant. There are no menus, no waitresses. QR codes are embedded in the tables. I ask someone if I can order something. “You scan the QR code…” “I don’t have a cell phone…” “Ohhh.” She seems tired as she fetches an iPad and helps me order and pay with a credit card. I apologize for creating extra work for her.
Los Angeles
I spend a lot of time and too much paper stockpiling printed driving directions to and from the three theaters where Wild Parrots will screen. They’re all accurate except the return trip to Silver Lake, where I’m staying with friends, from the Royal Theater in Santa Monica. I come to a “T” late at night in a deserted area near the Dodger Stadium and have no idea which way to turn. I turn right. Wrong! I end up in Chinatown and other downtown locations, places I’ve never been before. I’m completely lost. And I’ve neglected to bring my husband Mark’s iPad, which has a temporary phone number for emergencies if there’s cell service. So, I keep driving and turning, following indistinct hunches and eventually circle back, ending up at the same “T.” Hooray! I turn left this time, drive quite a distance on deserted, unlit roads and finally come to Riverside Street, which is on my MapQuest directions. From there it’s easy.
Back Home
Why put myself through all these ridiculous tests? Why not just go with the flow, get a phone? I can’t honestly say! Maybe I’m a contrarian. I know I’m stubborn. I’ve never had one, and until recently have gotten along pretty well. I did feel, when I was “lost in LA,” that I had an intuitive sense of the geography that helped me find my way back to that “T.” Reliance on GPS supplants mental maps with blind adherence to its preferred routes, even if they lead to a mountain trailhead that doesn’t exist, a cul de sac that Google is unaware of, or the end of a dock that’s described as a road. Some of these GPS errors have resulted in deaths. At the very least, they unnecessarily lead people astray.
I witness this phenomenon every day when I walk to my editing room in North Beach from my house on the east side of Telegraph Hill. Greenwich Street, on the west side of the hill, ends in a cul de sac. Drivers who’ve been led to believe by GPS that Greenwich intersects with Telegraph Hill Blvd above clog the small dead-end street day and night, with cars slowly circling the turnaround to head back down the hill. I’ve seen this parade of cars grow over the 22 years I’ve been walking that route, and just the other night witnessed a driverless Waymo stuck in the cul de sac for half an hour.
Caleb Harlon
A young waiter at Philz Coffee, Caleb Harlon gave up social media about two years ago but was still using his iPhone 12 a lot. In January he switched to a flip phone. “It wasn’t specifically a (New Year’s) resolution,” he told me in an email, “just something I knew I had to do. I have genuinely been able to take my mind off-line more and enjoy downtime and in-between time.”
Caleb will complete his B.A. in Philosophy at SF State in December and will then pursue a nursing degree. His age puts him in the Millennial Generation, “so I feel like I’m fond of life before cellphones.” People born after 1996 – Generation Z, now age 11-26 – don’t have that luxurious memory.
Resources
Books
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke
Stolen Focus by Dan Harris
The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig
How To Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price
Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
Film
The Social Dilemma (Netflix) – a behind-the-scenes look at social media data harvesting