Simo / Living With It

Using a phone, and being used by one.

The difference is not the number of hours. It is the direction the request travels.

There is a workable distinction between two kinds of contact with the object, and it has nothing to do with duration. In the first, a person has a question and goes to the phone to answer it: what time does the ferry leave, what was the name of that street, is it going to rain. The visit has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end is obvious because the question is answered. Half an hour spent this way is unremarkable, in the same category as half an hour spent with a reference book.

In the second, the phone raises a matter and the person responds. A tone, a light, a small mark on a screen, and attention goes where it is sent. This visit has a beginning supplied by the device and no natural end at all, because there was never a question to answer. The same person can spend six minutes this way and feel worse about it than an hour of the first kind, which is a good clue that duration was never the right measurement. What differs is who initiated the exchange.

Naming the two is not a prescription. Plenty of the second kind is entirely welcome: a message from a friend, a delay notice for a train, a call that matters. The point is simply that the two feel different from inside, and that most people already know which one they have just had. Someone who notices the direction of the request has a far more useful instrument for thinking about their own use than any count of hours, and the noticing costs nothing and requires no equipment.