In Praise of Intentional Tech: Single Use Devices

 

    Technology is designed to make our lives easier. From the first stone tools to the latest smartphone, that is the end goal. Easier to work, easier to relax, easier to connect, easier to live. And, by and large, this has been a net positive for humanity. Whatever you may read in the news we do actually live in the most peaceful time in history, but you wouldn't know that by how frantic and frazzled most people seem to be.

But all this ease and convenience come at a price. The smartphone has replaced cameras, MP3 players, radios, wallets, keys, and newspapers -- for many they’ve also replaced physical books and laptop and desktop computers. They are enormously convenient. Smartphones do everything… and that’s part of the problem.

    Smartphones are addicting, and they’re designed to be that way. We use them to fill every idle moment. According to a study by Asurion Americans check their phones every 2 minutes and 45 seconds. We can do basically anything on our phones, and that can lead to us really doing nothing with them. 

A good ol' 4th gen iPod

    I have an old clickwheel iPod that I like to use to listen to music. It’s old, it has a black and white LCD, and it does nothing but play music. It doesn’t have any wifi so I can’t use Spotify on it. To put any new music on it I have to actually get the music rather than using a streaming service. I listen to a lot of indie music so I like to use bandcamp since they give artists a bigger cut than Amazon or iTunes (is iTunes even still around?). It also has no bluetooth so I use good old fashioned wired headphones. It’s less convenient than just pulling up music on spotify and listening with my wireless earbuds, but it’s so much more intentional. Because streaming services have made basically all music so easily accessible, it has caused listening to music to turn into background noise. When I use my old iPod to listen to music it becomes an intentional activity, and as a result I am more fully able to appreciate what I am listening to. It’s nice to sit down, select an album and listen to it all the way through without doing anything else. You can certainly do this with a smartphone, but there’s always all the other apps and notifications pulling you out of the experience. A smartphone, with its myriad apps, can play music. But the iPod is about music.

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    The Kindle is another device built around intentionality and a single function; it’s built for reading. The E-ink display is greyscale and the refresh rate is pretty sluggish so it can’t play videos, and the experimental browser it has is basically useless. I have a feeling the intentionality of the Kindle has more to do with the limitations of E-Ink technology rather than any plan on Amazon’s part. But this limitation means that the Kindle is a device that does the one function it does, reading, very well. I mostly read Science Fiction, Fantasy, and books on history, and these tend to regularly be 600+ page books. The Kindle has enabled me to read much more often simply because of the thinness of the device. The front light is great for reading at night too. 

    I don’t own the Freewrite but I love the idea. It’s basically a word processor with an E-Ink display and the ability to back up your documents to the cloud. One of the biggest problems I’ve had with writing is how easily distracted I am when using a computer. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat down with a Word document open, intent on focusing only on writing, only to end up browsing the internet and getting nothing substantial done. Part of this is personal discipline, but I love the idea of a device built around intentionality and writing. I’d love to try out the Freewrite sometime and see how beneficial it would be to my productivity.

    Cultivating intentionality is something I’ve been striving to do, and using technology with purpose, rather than going on autopilot, has been great for my mental health and focus. I’ve looked at three pieces of technology here that embody an intentional mindset. They are limited in their functionality, but what they do they do well. That doesn’t mean we need to throw our smart devices out. I plan to write a follow up to this post where I’ll explore ways to use these ubiquitous devices in our lives more intentionally and how we can get the best benefit from the capabilities they do offer.