material objects anchor us

The material objects in our life serve to link our past and present lives ^1. As time goes on, we have less anchors to our past. Technology replaces many of these objects with one object, the smart phone.

Most technologies were single-use prior to the iPhone. You take notes in a notebook. You talk on the phone with a phone. You listen to music with an iPod or CD player. You read a book. You take pictures with a camera.

Digitization leads to fewer anchors.

Examples:

• Facetiming friends vs having them on your couch
• Photos on an iPhone vs a photo album
• Spotify streaming vs swapping CDs or records
• E-readers vs physical books
• Digital notes vs paper notebooks

The fewer anchors we have, the harder it is to recall these small moments in our day to day. The years start to blend together.

Spatial context enhances memory. You remember where an idea was on a certain page. I remember taking tests in school. And a question would come up and I knew the answer was on this certain page, in this certain spot on the page. The spatial part of the textbook would enable me to recall the information better.

Similarly, reading a physical book takes us back to a specific time in our lives, whereas a kindle book loses that ability. When I pick up the Kindle, I do not think of a specific time or place. Hundreds of books have been read on the same device, across many states and coffee shops. When I pick up Demons by Dostoevsky, I can tell you what music I listened to back then, who I hung out with, and where I was when I read it in 2016.

I love the convenience of a small e-reader, especially as someone who enjoys reading several books at the same time. But the case can be made for prioritizing reading physical books to promote anchoring and spatial context. There is nothing better than pulling a book off a shelf and flipping through the dog-eared pages. Looking over kindle highlights is a very different experience.

One fun thing to combat this consolidation of devices and objects is a Polaroid Camera. Not only is it a single-use device, it also instantly prints the photo. These polaroid pictures help anchor us. They become real and tangible, unlike thousands of photos stored in an iPhone. They can be hung around the house or found later.

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening. – Marshall McLuhan

For most of these scenarios of digitization leading to consolidation and lack of anchors, we have hardly made active choices. Most of us know something is off or feels different. Maybe we are nostalgic for a simpler time. But we cannot quite verbalize what the issue is. Once we acknowledge this issue, we can make more informed choices about our technology uses. We can choose to have anchors over convenience if that is more important to us.

[1] L.M. Sacasas wrote about this concept in The Stuff of Life: Materiality and the Self and inspired this post.