The Blue Dot
There’s a specific kind of helplessness that hits when you step off a bus in an unfamiliar neighborhood and realize your phone is gone. Not the phone-on-silent-somewhere-in-the-apartment helplessness. The actual gone kind. And you’re already late.
I’d had the iPhone long enough by then that it had worked its way from expensive toy to constant companion to something I didn’t have a clean word for. Not a friend exactly, but something that performed several of the functions a friend performs: always there, always had an answer, never judged me for checking it at 2 a.m. I’d assembled the usual collection of apps, most of them useless in retrospect. Shazam, which I used maybe twice. A barcode scanner that never found the right code. A recipe app that made it very easy to browse dinners I would never cook. A fashion aggregator that assembled the best of the mode blogs into a single feed of low-res photos with ad banners running across the top—I have no idea why I thought that was a good use of screen space, but there it was. Radio apps. News apps. Skype for when I was traveling. And Facebook, which was the real problem.
Before the iPhone, I had what passed for discipline: I checked Facebook once, maybe twice a day. A deliberate choice, made at a deliberate time, at a desk, like a reasonable person. The moment I had it in my pocket with push notifications on, something changed. Every ping was a small obligation. Every message answered the same day, at minimum. It sounds attentive—considerate, even—but what it actually was was compulsive. You start treating every free second as a chance to be productive, productive in the information-consumption sense, and then the seconds that aren’t filled start to feel wasted. The queue at the supermarket becomes a reading window. The two minutes waiting for the bus becomes a scroll. Why wouldn’t you use the time? The phone as constant aide, helping you optimize.
What I didn’t notice, until I had to notice it, was the guy behind me in line who’d placed his beer next to my groceries with the quiet hope of a conversation. I was busy looking at profile pictures of someone I barely knew from a class I’d already half-forgotten.
The circumstances that led to losing the phone aren’t the point. The aftermath is. There was bureaucracy involved—the kind with forms and offices in unfamiliar parts of the city—and one afternoon I found myself standing at a bus stop in a neighborhood I’d never been to, having looked up the route at home, having glanced at a map, and still being completely, immediately lost the moment I stepped onto the pavement. I knew what I wanted: the small blue dot moving reliably toward the red pin. The feeling of being oriented without doing the work of orientation. Instead I had a street I didn’t recognize, a direction that felt wrong, and a silence the city kept filling in from the edges—traffic, voices, someone’s music through a cracked window.
I walked. Not looking down. There was nothing to look down at. The posture alone felt strange; I’d been moving through the world at a slight forward tilt for months, head angled toward a screen. At some point I’d stopped walking through streets and started walking through a feed.
Eventually I stopped someone and asked for directions. They gave me a fairly involved answer—the kind with landmarks and turnings you can’t hold in your head all at once—and I thanked them and set off with about sixty percent confidence. I doubted the instructions the whole way. But I arrived. And standing there in front of the right building on the right street, I felt something I hadn’t expected: a very mild, very genuine satisfaction. The kind you can’t get from a blue dot.