DEMOTING OUR DEVICES

I got my first smartphone in 2006, during my freshman year of college. It was a BlackBerry Pearl, a gray rectangular brick with a white chiclet set in the middle of the keyboard. I was obsessed with it, and spent hours a day emailing, playing Brick Breaker, and coming up with clever BBMs — BlackBerry’s proprietary text messages, which could only be sent to other BlackBerry owners and, therefore, became a status symbol among nerds on campus.

In a world of simple flip phones, having a BlackBerry was a superpower — an Alexandrian library in my pocket, ready at a moment’s notice to look up any fact, settle any dispute, or communicate with anyone I’d ever met. It was less like getting a cool new gadget than gaining a kind of ambient hyper-awareness, assembled via a constant trickle of real-time updates.

I assumed that, eventually, the novelty would wear off. But it never did. Instead, I dug in deeper. When the iPhone was released in 2007, I lined up to get one. I started a Twitter account and set up an RSS reader. I formed group texts and got news alerts