Try doing this with your cellphone: lock it up

Have you ever wondered why our favourite digital devices and social media have such cute, even childlike, names?

Apple computers. BlackBerry phones. iPads. Tweeting.

I took a selfie with my smartphone. I friended you on Facebook. Cynic that I am, I assume the baby talk is a vast disguise. It allows us to feel safe around these machines, while they relentlessly make us dependent on them.

“There’s definitely a cuteness component,” said Marcel O’Gorman, an English professor at University of Waterloo, and the founding director of its Critical Media Lab.

“It takes away some of the fear people have of technology.”

Calling a computer by the name of a fruit certainly makes it seem more friendly. But it’s also the sheep’s clothing that hides the wolf, O’Gorman says.

Your cellphone can take your attention away from your physical surroundings. That’s danger- ous if you happen to be crossing a busy street. And it’s intellectually and socially corrosive if you’re in a classroom, or at the family dinner table.

So-called social media connects you with people far away, and helps you make many new acquaintances, but there is plenty of research showing that it also makes us feel more lonely and isolated.

Some of us are on Facebook for hours, compulsively scrolling through pictures of other people who are on vacation, receiving an award, having a marvellous dinner out with friends, or otherwise having more fun than we are. A few people announce they’re taking a break from Facebook, but most of us are too hopelessly addicted.

O’Gorman says there’s a growing concept of abstinence from digital devices, or as he puts it in his new article in Atlantic magazine, “digital temperance.”

France has now outlawed smartphone use in public schools. Some inventors have created locked boxes that offer a compromise: Your phone is safe and close by, but not accessible. “You can hold it, but you can’t use it,” O’Gorman writes.

Some performing artists such as comedian Chris Rock require audience members to lock their phones away in a pouch they take with them into the show, O’Gorman said.

This ensures the full attention of the audience, and prevents bootleg videos from being made. The pouch is unlocked afterwards, using technology similar to stores as they remove anti-theft tags off expensive clothing after you’ve purchased it.

But that’s pretty heavy-handed, O’Gorman says, and “doesn’t teach any kind of self-control.” He has a different idea. Next week, O’Gorman will be at St. Mary’s High School in Kitchener for an experiment in unplugging. With some assistants, he will teach several hundred high school students to make their own “resistor case,” in which to store their phones.

He hopes students will value the cases more because they’ll be making them themselves. Each case has a clasp that uses Velcro, which makes a really loud noise when you open it. It’s up to students whether the case is opened or stays closed, but others are watching — and listening.

He sees the benefits of technology. But he understands, as is said of fire, that it’s a good servant and a bad master. If technology is going to define our lives, then we should have a say, he argues.

“It shouldn’t be a 19-year-old engineer at a startup deciding what we’re going to be using.”