Julia Bell (1) (1971–)

Smombies

Julia Bell says that she regularly bumps into people on the street staring at their phones; she calls them smombies.

This is an essay published in book form which discusses how much humanity is losing by overuse of smartphones and other internet activity. I have to say that she is preaching to the converted with me, because I hardly use my smartphone, certainly not referring to it every 12 minutes which she claims is average for most people. The essay makes the following points.

People continually scrolling on their phones are unaware of what is going on around them and a public announcement system in San Francisco puts this into perspective:

"For your comfort and security keep your eyes on the scenery and not on the screen"

People are behaving like automatons scroll/click/reward, they are losing their personality, instead of being liberated by technology people have become weirdly trapped.

We are losing the capacity to connect with others, to be present with them and this is particularly the case with children born into a world of late capitalism; in an environment of individual competition, where the pressure is to exploit others, which is heralded as the primary model of success.

The constant buzz of information on the internet does not give us time to think, it is all about instant reaction, we are losing the art of radical attention. Our online attention is worth money because it generates data. It is this data that is mined to push products, deals, schemes our way. Google knows us better than our family, our partners or our closest friends. Alerts are pushed at us in a way that generates fake urgency, they do not want to give us time to think.

The internet is the home of much hate propaganda, certain groups of society are targeted. The internet also provides a platform for people to make outrageous statements; this is welcomed by internet companies, because it generates more data as people respond in like fashion; Donald Trump on twitter is used as an example. If we are enraged then we are engaged.
A professional in the field of data mining claims that most people are really easy to manipulate, because they are generally stupid.

Julia Bell quotes Iris Murdoch:
Unsentimental, detached, unselfish objective attention is a prerequisite of the ability to perceive what is true.

Bell concludes her essay saying:

Allowing ourselves to experience our individual wedge shaped core of darkness, without being nudged, or pushed, or spied upon, is the most difficult, necessary and radical act of all.

The essay is composed in fairly concise paragraphs, interspersed with news items that give examples to the points she is making. Is is almost as though she is writing for people with short attention spans. It worked well enough for me, with sections briefly covering pornography, incels, skills based education and of course artificial intelligence. It was published in 2020 at the time of covid lockdowns and raises the question of the loneliness of continual online usage. It is a little like a clarion call and it skates perilously close to being somewhat of a conspiracy theory in that white, male, super-rich people are shaping our destiny. It was another book recommended by contributors to the London Review of Books and I am glad I read it - 4 stars.… (altro)