No technological invention has become omnipresent so fast, no gadget has revolutionised the way we interact socially and gather and share information so rapidly, as the smartphone.
In the last two decades most of us have come to the conclusion that our smartphones are an extension of our bodies. So what happens when that extra limb, with a direct feed to our brain, is ripped from us?
The Sydney writer, actor and film-maker Alex Lykos embarked on a 30-day digital detox to find out, documenting his month without smartphone, tablet or laptop on film.
The experience put his personal relationships on the line, threw his daily life into disarray and forced him to make some major and permanent changes.
His film Disconnect Me opens in limited cinemas around Australia from 19 October.
It was a project motivated by his own sense of despondency, he says. He had become beholden to the ping and the scroll, ceaselessly checking his news feeds and social media apps on his Android phone. And it was making him miserable; feelings of jealousy towards colleagues getting better gigs than him, envy towards those heading off to holidays in Hawaii or meandering in the Maldives; sad, if not bitter, doubts about career choices made and financial status achieved.
“I’d spend two hours of my time scrolling through social media and then I’d feel worse,” he says.
“I started asking, ‘What’s the return on investment here? … I need a circuit breaker.’”
Lykos’s wife is filmed locking her partner’s smartphone, tablet and laptop in the family safe. Over the next month the relationship between the couple would deteriorate to what the film-maker described as increasingly “terse”, although this is disclosed in the interview, not reflected on screen. Her appearances in the film become increasingly fleeting. She had no wish to take part in the social experiment or the documentary, Lykos says, and it was out of the question that the couple’s primary school-aged child would play any role either.
This has the effect of portraying the film’s protagonist as an increasingly isolated being, negotiating daily life armed with a digital alarm clock, Gregory’s street directory, newspaper and what looks like a 1960s-era rotary dial telephone. Lykos’s NBN connection could not and would not tolerate the latter; he ends up replacing the relic with a 1980s push-button model, via which his elderly father subjects the film-maker to daily verbal assaults in Greek (“Get a real meaningful job with a secure wage, not some documentary-making crap” – subtitled) from day one.
He interviews Australian experts on technology, artificial intelligence and the nature of addiction. He speaks to primary school children and teenagers about their prolific phone use and their love-hate relationship with social media. He explores the tactics video games use to induce in children’s brains the same dopamine rush that gamblers experience in the throes of a winning binge.
Nearing the end of the first week, he feels pleasantly unburdened from the carefully curated Facebook lives of other people. But he pines for the loss of his own little dopamine hits at the sound of each once-familiar ping. He gets lost using the Gregory’s. On day six he realises he cannot pay his film crew; the security code to authorise the electronic funds transfer has been sent to his Android. He plays golf.
1. Delete all social media apps from your phone. If that seems too drastic try deleting one a month.
2. Place a daily limit on time spent on social media.
3. Allocate a specific spot in your home for your phone. Upon entering, leave it there set to silent.
4. Call a meeting with family/partner/friends to set some ground rules.
5. On weekends, try leaving your phone at home.
By day 13 family discord has set in. Lykos’s father has resorted to calling his daughter-in-law to continue the theme of his son’s shortcomings. Without instant messaging the household routine is thrown into chaos. The messages Lykos’s wife leaves on his answering machine sound increasingly brusque. He plays more golf.
By day 17 he’s ready to call it all off.
“I’m not speaking to anyone,” he says. “My wife is losing it, my dad is losing it. Everyone is losing it. I’m done. I need my phone. It’s too hard.”
He narrowly avoids a collision reading the Gregory’s while driving.
On day 20 he cheats. Sort of. This story will contain no spoilers.
When the safe is unlocked on the 30th day, there are 238 missed WhatsApp messages on Lykos’s Android, hundreds of unanswered personal emails and 99+ Facebook messages, including seven from Meta itself, each message more insistent than the last that he has missed out on so much since we (Meta’s algorithm) detected a sudden absence in engagement.
There were no lost job opportunities, no momentous milestones missed nor calamitous events visited upon friends or family members.
Lykos concludes that it is not the technology in his life per se that had become problematic but the way he allowed the technology to control him.
Disconnect Me is billed as a documentary, and Lykos cites his rookie status as a documentary film-maker (his two previous feature films were the romcoms Alex & Eve and Me & My Left Brain) as the reason why he has a tendency in his latest film to … well, at times stretch the truth with some of the many startling facts, disseminated without critical thought, that the film tosses at its audience.
No, there are not more smartphones in the world than humans, humankind does not now have an average attention span shorter than a goldfish, and 72% of Australian children do not play video games containing gambling components. And do we really touch our smartphones more than 2,600 times a day? Only if you count every tap, type, click and swipe as a touch. So a text message consisting of 20 characters counts as 20 “touches”.
“In hindsight, there’s a lot of things I should have done that I didn’t,” he tells Guardian Australia. Like hiring a factchecker?
“It was a low-budget film.”
Maybe it’s more of the vibe of the thing?
“Ultimately I want people to come to the cinema and first and foremost have a good time … If people can just go away after and have a discussion with their children or with their partner or with their family members about technology use within the bubble of their community, then I’m happy.”
More than a year on from his 30-day digital detox, Lykos says he has maintained most of his modified smartphone habits.
He has removed all social media apps from his phone and checks his socials on a laptop every evening, giving himself a 30-minute limit.
He has deleted all news apps but has not returned to the newspaper buying habit.
“I like my politics, and before I would have Twitter up throughout the day, constantly reading through the minutiae of the day’s politics,” Lykos says.
“Now I’ll get home, take care of the family stuff , then jump on Twitter and I’ll knock out the highlights of what happened in politics that day within 10 minutes.”
He continues to play golf.
