This essay explores topics discussed in Tiger Roholt’s recently published book, Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones.
Imagine that you are at the DMV [sorry]. You are filling out forms to renew your long-expired driver’s license. After you complete the forms, you wait in line to submit the forms and payment. You are also having an unrelated text-message conversation with a friend. This is not a demanding kind of multitasking. You can text while intermittently filling out forms, starting and stopping each activity as needed. This sporadic approach need not have a negative effect on completing the forms accurately. In fact, if the text conversation is a particularly interesting one, this multitasking may even make your trip to the DMV (dare I say) pleasant!
Consider a more complex scenario, a session of an undergraduate philosophy seminar. The professor and students are focused on Book I of Plato’s Republic, attempting to make sense of Thrasymachus’s view of justice. In conversation, they begin to piece this together by pointing to some of Thrasymachus’s early statements, reading the occasional short passage from the text. The professor guides the group, asking questions and making suggestions. She encourages everyone in the group to weigh-in, to interact. They arrive at a provisional understanding of Thrasymachus’s initial claim. The professor then asks why Thrasymachus believes he is correct about justice, inviting students to recall, and locate in the text, supporting reasons for his claim. Following this, they begin to consider objections that the character, Socrates, makes to Thrasymachus’s reasoning. Some of the students then consider what seem to be Thrasymachus’s rejoinders in the text. This leads the group to conceive of what Thrasymachus offers a few pages later as a reformulation of his original position.
Now imagine that one student in the seminar, Joe, is having a text conversation with a friend, surreptitiously holding his phone just below the tabletop. The text conversation is what social scientists writing about smartphone-distraction call off-task; Joe’s friend is having a dispute with another, mutual friend, and the friend wants advice from Joe. Like the DMV scenario, this is not multitasking in the sense of performing two tasks simultaneously; this is serial task-switching. Joe is shifting his attention back and forth, between the seminar and the text conversation. Unlike filling out forms at the DMV, even simply following a seminar discussion is attentionally and cognitively demanding, and Joe cannot pause the seminar whenever he reads or writes a text message (obviously). In both the seminar and at the DMV, the friend will not wait too long for replies. At the DMV, this time constraint can be dealt with easily by pausing the work on the forms. (Why am I not discussing laptops or tablets? See Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones, 2.5. Henceforth DM.)
With such an approach, it stands to reason that Joe will have difficulty following the arguments, not to mention difficulty participating effectively in the discussion. We know that tracking a philosophical discussion requires holding multiple points in one’s mind for an extended period of time; participating in a discussion is even more demanding. In order to follow the thread of the discussion, Joe must know which statement is Thrasymachus’s initial claim, which is a supporting reason, an objection, a rejoinder. And he must grasp logical relations between statements; for example, he must grasp whether or not a particular claim follows from a certain supporting reason.
But perhaps I am making too much of this. Perhaps I am taking an unduly negative view of smartphone task-switching in a seminar. If Joe doesn’t participate, and only partially follows the group’s analysis, what exactly is the loss? Joe is a very adept task-switcher; he is practiced and skilled at shifting his attention rapidly back and forth. He task-switches in many situations throughout every day. He will surely grasp some of the seminar’s content. Isn’t it the case that he can piece-together what he misses by speaking later with fellow students, checking their notes, consulting the text again? Let’s be very charitable and assume that he can.
In fact, if Joe were to read these paragraphs, he might add that he is conscious of what he is doing; it is a deliberate choice. He simply enjoys his 150 minutes in a seminar more by adopting this approach: he occasionally listens to the seminar discussion, occasionally texts with friends, occasionally scrolls Instagram. If, in the end, he can learn what he needs to learn, and if he has figured out a way to extract maximal pleasure from these 150 minutes, who are we to criticize? (In Chapter 6 of DM, I explore the negative effects a student like Joe may have on the group context, and I then consider the way in which some other students depend upon this context not just for learning but in order to shape their own self-identities. Here and below, however, I set aside such issues in order to focus on Joe’s interests.)
Joe is comfortable with his choice because he can later piece-together the content he misses in the seminar; this suggests that he conceives of the seminar in means/end terms. The end, the objective, is to learn about Thrasymachus’s position, the main philosophical content of the seminar session. (Let’s pause to appreciate Joe for a moment—a more superficial student might conceive of the seminar’s end as earning a grade or as the satisfaction of a program requirement.)
Joe’s framing of the seminar is helpful, because, on this means/end construal, the impact of smartphone distraction can be understood in terms of performance cost. This is the approach to smartphone distraction we find in the social science literature. For example, in healthcare studies involving nurses, the negative effects of off-task smartphone-use while on duty are cashed out in terms of performance decrements (see DM 2.1). If we were to adopt this approach (we won’t), we could conceive of the effects of smartphone distraction in the seminar in terms of the distraction’s impact on learning. After all, even according to our charitable construal, Joe does miss some content in the seminar. The impact of the smartphone distraction could be characterized in terms of this loss.
I want to contend that this performance-cost characterization of smartphone distraction in a seminar falls short. Even if Joe can piece together an understanding of the seminar’s content after the fact, he has still missed out on something. I want to suggest that what the means/end picture leaves out is that actively engaging in a philosophy seminar can be meaningful. In the remainder of this essay, I will say something about the nature of meaningfulness while making the case that smartphone distraction from meaningfulness cannot be adequately understood in terms of performance cost.
What do I mean by meaningfulness? In DM, I employ Susan Wolf’s account of meaning in life as a straightforward skeleton which I flesh out by drawing from John Dewey’s notion of “an experience” and Albert Borgmann’s focal things and focal practices. Here, I will limit myself to a few comments about, and one elaboration of, Wolf’s view.
Susan Wolf claims that a good life has three distinct dimensions—happiness, morals, and meaningfulness. If we emphasize activities, her Fitting Fulfillment view of meaning in life is quite practicable; it can be applied in a piecemeal fashion. She holds that an activity generates meaning in one’s life if it satisfies both a subjective and an objective condition. For an activity to be meaningful, it must be subjectively fulfilling and it must be objectively valuable (this second component is what “fitting” refers to in Fitting Fulfillment). Continuing with my example, participating in a philosophy seminar will generate meaning in one’s life if one finds it subjectively fulfilling, and if this activity is objectively valuable. Another element of Wolf’s theory is that one must be actively engaged in the activity. Below I will add something to what Wolf says about active engagement, which I take to be a precondition for subjective fulfillment. (A further aspect of her view, which I cannot address here, is that the subjective fulfillment and objective value of an activity must be “suitably linked.” See page 39 of the Wolf book linked above.)
Beginning with the subjective condition, this captures the straightforward notion that if one is not passionate about philosophy seminars—that is, if one is not gripped by them—then seminars are not subjectively fulfilling to that person nor ultimately meaningful. Although I devote significant time to this condition in DM, here I will not.
Regarding the objective condition, Wolf is forthright about not having an account of objective value. She also signals an openness to a relatively loose construal: “In claiming that meaningfulness has an objective component … I mean only to insist that something other than a radically subjective account of value must be assumed.” Along these lines, she occasionally replaces the phrase “objective value” with “nonsubjective value.” The spirit of her approach, I believe, is to attempt to find a basis for meaningfulness beyond mere subjective fulfillment. In this vein, Wolf offers the thought-provoking suggestion that an activity that has nonsubjective value is one that possesses value “whose source comes from outside of oneself—whose value, in other words, is in part independent of one’s own attitude to it.” (These quotations, and the phrase “nonsubjective value,” can be found on pages 45 and 37 of the Wolf book linked above.)
Philosophy seminars have nonsubjective value in the above sense. A practice that enables one to learn philosophy through dialogical exploration is valuable. And there are many other valuable aspects of a seminar. The value of these aspects is not reducible to an individual’s subjective attitude, not reducible to a person’s passion for seminars.
The work one has to do to make logical sense of a text, or to follow an emerging argument, improves one’s cognitive abilities. Seminars afford this development; this is nonsubjectively valuable. Relatedly, in a philosophical discussion, one is often striving to find an alternate orientation or a strategically effective turn of reasoning that will enable one to negotiate a philosophical obstacle. A case can be made that engaging in a philosophy seminar encourages one to do such imaginative work, providing an opportunity to foster one’s, let’s say, philosophical imagination.
And after the recent years of pandemic living, can’t we acknowledge that in-person social interaction is quite valuable? In a good philosophy seminar, we enjoy an intellectual sort of social interaction that can be convivial and even intense. This is nonsubjectively valuable. (Above, I am taking inspiration from Chapter 14 of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.)
A student who is very serious about philosophy carves out an intellectual layer of her self-identity with and through philosophy. Perhaps we can say that she employs the methodology and draws upon the history of philosophy to think about the world and her place in it. Some of this identity-work happens in philosophy seminars. Having such a practice within which one can do this work is valuable.
If the value of a seminar is as multifarious as I am suggesting, then we are unlikely to arrive at an effective characterization of a seminar by framing it in terms of means and end. Conceiving of a seminar as a means for learning leaves out these other valuable aspects.
If a seminar cannot be adequately understood in terms of means and ends, then it will be inadequate to conceive of smartphone distraction occurring within a seminar in this way. That is, once we accept that a seminar has a variety of valuable aspects, it will prove unhelpful to characterize smartphone distraction only in terms of performance cost vis-à-vis learning, because this would not address the impact of smartphone distraction upon these other valuable aspects. Instead, I believe that we should conceive of smartphone distraction as interference with the sort of active engagement a seminar requires.
Before turning to active engagement, I should mention that, in DM, I classify philosophy seminars with a variety of other activities (practices, in fact)—dinners with family/friends, attending musical and other arts performances, attending sporting events, running, carpentry, and so on. I realize that this grouping may strike the reader as unusual. This grouping emerges from my interpretation of what Albert Borgmann calls a focal practice. I mention this here only to point out that my topic is not smartphone distraction from philosophy seminars; my topic is smartphone distraction from meaningful practices.
Now, to find an activity engaging means that one is attracted to it (as opposed to being bored or alienated by it, as Wolf often points out). But I want to focus on another sense of engagement, which is to be involved in an activity. By active engagement, then, I have in mind proactively involving oneself perceptually, cognitively, imaginatively, and in some cases bodily in an activity.
Notice that valuable aspects of meaningful practices, such as those we are considering, are not graspable via passive perception; they must be unlocked, so to speak, by means of active engagement. For example, one must be actively engaged in a seminar in order to develop one’s philosophical imagination, to develop one’s cognitive abilities. Certainly, one cannot develop one’s philosophical imagination by passively witnessing a seminar discussion, simply hearing/watching it “go by,” as one might take in a parade.
Consider another example that highlights the importance of active engagement. The social dimension of a given seminar session might possess a particular character or quality. A participant in a discussion might notice that there is a quality of generosity that has emerged in this session’s interaction. But in order to become aware of this feature of the session, one must not only be following the philosophical import of discussants’ comments, one must be keyed-in to the ways in which the comments are expressed and are related to one another. Khalil’s comment is not only an elaboration of a claim made by Emma, but it has the quality of generosity. How so? In just a couple of words, or even just a facial expression, Khalil signals appreciation for the way in which Emma’s comment added fruitfully to the discussion. One would not detect the generosity emerging in this interaction if one were not following the conversation attentively, actively.
Here is what I have been driving at. If you are not actively engaged in an activity, you are likely to miss valuable aspects of the activity. If you fail to grasp some valuable aspects of an activity, this reduces the chances that the activity will grip you. Not engaging actively, in other words, reduces the likelihood that you will be subjectively fulfilled by an activity. And following Wolf, subjective fulfillment is a necessary condition of meaningfulness. We have considered an example in which serial task-switching with a smartphone interferes with active engagement. To be distracted by your smartphone in a seminar, a dinner with friends, or a musical performance, I contend, may prevent you from finding it meaningful.
I imagine Joe offering a final plea: “But I am simply not passionate about philosophy seminars!” Given this, he reasons, he might as well approach seminars by maximizing his pleasure through task-switching. This, he says, contributes to his overall happiness. Let’s assume that Joe is correct that this contributes to his happiness, granting as well that happiness is a matter of maximizing pleasure. But let’s follow Wolf in the view that happiness and meaningfulness are distinct dimensions of a good life.
My worry is that by not actively engaging with philosophy seminars, Joe may have never given himself the opportunity to become passionate about them. And since our smartphone habits can become quite ingrained, it is likely that Joe’s task-switching tendencies in seminars resemble his comportment in other settings as well (see Chapter 2 of DM). Does Joe engage actively with other potentially meaningful activities? If he does not, then Joe’s habit of serial task-switching may be blocking him from discovering a passion for various activities, leaving much meaning on the table.
Tiger Roholt
Tiger Roholt writes about meaningfulness, technology, art and music. His M.A. and Ph.D. are from Columbia University; his B.A. is from the University of Minnesota.
