Tribology and phone screen time
This past week I added another word to my vocabulary: tribology. According to the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers, tribology is “the study of surfaces moving relative to one another.” They go on to explain that such study focuses on three related factors in the world: friction, lubrication, and wear. Though I offer this information from the STLE website, that’s not where I learned the term tribology. I learned that word when I picked up Jennifer Vail’s book Friction: A Biography as I was browsing the local independent bookstore. I skimmed a few pages and thought it was very interesting, but resisted the temptation of yet another distraction from the books that I’m currently reading. With some reluctance, I put the book back down on the recent arrivals table.
But I want to say a few things about tribology or, more to the point, the topics of friction, lubrication, and wear. I’m thinking of those topics in light of my recent project to track the amount of time I spend on my phone in hopes of reducing that time. If you’ve not seen my posts about that, look through the recent history. I’ll wait for you here.
I think my biggest takeaway from that project is the interplay of lubrication and friction. My use of the phone had become ingrained in my subconscious mental state and even in my muscle memory. As I said in at least one of those posts, it wasn’t at all unusual – in fact, it was typical — for me to notice that my hand was reaching in my pocket for my phone only after the phone was already in my hand and I was looking at the screen. The movement was so smooth that it was undetectable. All I had to do was look up from the book I was reading, or step away from the coffee I was brewing, and I would find my phone in front of my face. I learned pretty quickly that the best, and perhaps the only, way to interrupt that flow of events was to introduce friction. No, I didn’t throw sand into the inner workings of the phone. But I left the phone in another room. The additional effort required to pick up the phone made it possible for me to take a brief break from a book, or step back from the chemex, and simply think.
So the friction introduced by requiring the extra effort cut down on the phone use: my subconscious and my hand couldn’t put the phone in front of my face so easily. But friction can enable action just as effectively as it can frustrate it — after all, it’s the friction between by bicycle’s tire and the pavement that allows me to propel myself forward on my rides. I know I’m stretching the metaphor here, but I found over the four weeks that the lack of easy access to the phone made it easier for me to move forward in my reading, to stay focused on the reading I was trying to do. And that, I think, is a good thing.
There’s still more to the story, and that is that I find that spending less time on the phone — mostly, spending less time doomscrolling the miserably depressing news of the day — put less wear on my mind and my spirit. I’ve long bemoaned the power of cable news to control the public mind with its relentless chasing and sensationalizing of news about the world. But what I realize now is that even if I limit my online feed to responsible news organizations and, as is more and more the case, independent journalists who have escaped the shackles of corporate journalism, too much time on the phone is too much wear and tear on my consciousness.
The little experiment is over — I’m not planning to post my weekly screen time this coming Sunday. But so far, at least, I’m holding on to the practice of leaving my phone elsewhere at least some of the day. My hand and subconscious are still more in control of my behavior than I’d like, so I continue to depend on the friction.
