Phone-Thing, Self-Thing
We discover our sense of self in steps starting in early childhood. It is between 2-3 months, at some point during infancy, when we first realize that the actions of “me”, the self-thing, produce some kind of reaction in our infant caregiver.
The famous test of self-discovery is the mirror test, also called the rouge test: place a child in front of a mirror, then put dirt or something on their nose. Before 18 months, the child will reach towards the mirror to wipe the dirt off; but somewhere between 18 and 24 months and thereafter, the child will reach instead towards their own nose, indicating independent recognition of the “my” in “my nose.”
Therefore, the mirroring of the infant by his caregiver precedes the mirroring of the infant by an actual honest to god physical mirror. It takes over a year - a year spent exclusively either sleeping or together with the caregiver - before the child can derive the self-thing alone, independently. Thousands of hours together in close physical proximity. I find this very remarkable!
Lots of parts of the brain are developing in that crucial year. A significant portion of our brain’s matter, a part as least as massive as the part that handles, say, walking around, breathing, or computer programming - is totally dedicated to the immediate physical presence of other people. The fusiform face area, developed to recognize another person’s face; the superior temporal sulcus, for seeing the motion and gaze of other people; the TPJ, for imagining what others are thinking; the insular cortex, for empathy; the DMN, for remembering others, for daydreaming and wondering about them; and the oxytocin system, for social bonding, love, reproduction, and childbirth.
It suggests that the true essence of the self is actually not composed of one but of two; it is the dyad: the self and some other, and the observation of the self by the other. That the self does not exist independently, and only time spent together with the other, observing and being observed by another person, can form it.
I have to state these facts about the self out loud because I think a lot has changed about the way we are seeing ourselves.
Next time you’re on the bus or in a crowded public space, look at someone who is on their phone. What do you notice? They are alone, aren’t they? When we’re on our phones, the world outside the phone screen sort of shrinks and disappears, with a magnitude sufficient to cause a thousand car accidents every day. The phone is a fundamentally different mode of self-construction. For one, it’s a flat 2-D surface; it has no smell and no touch. The noise it makes is not informed by the echoes in the room. The interactions are different too, they are anonymous, frequently cynical, voyeurish; sometimes stupid and other times vicious. The phone is not a loving caregiver, the phone is not a physical reflection, a physical face that mirrors one’s own sadness or laughter. When turned off, it’s an inert glass slab. It is a companion quite alien to the human brain.
The phone is a surveillance device. It is a front-end for a massive constantly humming machine. The backend datacenter attached to the phone by wireless tendril is so large that it can only be fully seen from the window of an airplane. The view from that high up, of course, doesn’t have any people in it; they are reduced by the scale to specks.
Construction of the self on the phone is a cerebral, deliberate, purposeful, non-intuitive activity. Construction of the self on the phone is self-surveillance: pointing the camera at ourself, recording ourself, playing back, editing, looping the static recording.
What I’m getting at is that the phone-thing and the self-thing are not the same thing. The extent to which they are different things is the extent to which the phone-thing does psychological damage to the self-thing. Every moment that we spend with the phone-thing is a moment that we do not spend with others to create the self-thing. Directing energy to the phone-thing is sucking the vitality out of the self-thing, shriveling it, weakening it, destroying it.
The median American spends nearly SEVEN HOURS PER DAY staring at a phone screen. The median American spends roughly 8 hours per day working and roughly 7 hours sleeping. The math on this is very straightforward. 7 + 8 + 7 = 22 hours. Two hours per day for a time-bucket that I desperately hope includes “not being alone.”
We’re not all babies. We know that babies need a bit more care and attention; we all have to go out alone sometimes into the world and do the things that we need to do. But, remember the baby? The baby who knows, smiling and giggling, oxytocin-soaked, who he is, with robustness and strength, at a foundational level, that he is?