Infrastructure for the Neo-Luddite Age

On Fridays last semester, I left my phone in my dorm during the school day.

Besides discovering the allure of alliteration (Phone Free Friday, patent pending), I learned a few things about the causes of our screen addiction — and how Harvard can help us become less attached to our phones.

Walk around Harvard, and you will see students incessantly checking their phones — in dining halls, libraries, lecture halls, and everywhere in between. The problem extends far beyond the short-form content and social media usually decried by neo-luddites to the constant barrage of emails and text messages while we’re here at school.

Take it from me: I haven’t had Instagram downloaded on my phone since 2021, and I have never had TikTok. You can delete social media all you want, but unless you are planning on also deleting Gmail and your messaging app of choice, the idea that you always need to be reachable and the anxiety of missing a seemingly important message will remain. Because our devices are almost always physically near us, we can’t escape this pressure. We can fool ourselves with the tantalizing idea that texting and emailing is productive and therefore excusable when it interrupts meals with friends — or the flow state of our essay writing processes.

Instead, our phones often prevent us from being present in the moment. Constant contact is destructive — to our productivity, to our relationships, and to our ability to engage fully with our daily lives.

Of course, Harvard life provides some of us with responsibilities that do in fact require us to be available nearly around the clock. Some reporters at The Crimson, for example, have to be reachable in order to reply to breaking news developments, should they occur.

Still, these jobs are few and far between. For most of us, there are sections of our lives that we must try harder to protect — reading and conversing with friends in the dining hall, among them.

Other institutions like New York University and Princeton University have piloted programs to demarcate device-free spaces — but, to my mind, there’s a final step they’re missing. We need infrastructure — ideally University or Housing Office-provided — to physically separate ourselves from our devices.

The Harvard I imagine has not only device-free sections of the dining hall and device-free rooms in libraries (yes, sometimes homework just involves a hard copy of a book and a trusty notebook), but also a place to put your device in the meantime. I firmly believe that Harvard students want to socialize and focus; they just need the help of a last-mile commitment device.

Ideally, I could walk into Lamont Library, check in a device at the desk to be locked away for a period of time, and then go about my reading.

Friends could walk into the dining hall, decide to have a device-free meal, actually commit to it by putting their phones in a designated cubby at the front, then sit in a designated device-free area of the dining hall. (I know what you’re thinking: It’s true, I’m a lot of fun at parties.)

In the past, other members of the Editorial Board and I have called for laptop and phone-free classrooms while drawing attention to our generation’s ever-worsening attention crisis. Still, the proposed countermeasures — website blockers and Wi-Fi-free nights — appear too paternalistic to some, suggesting that any separation from our screens has to be voluntary and not semi-coerced. It may seem like a phone cubby system in Lamont exemplifies that paternalism — with the College playing the role of dictator-curious babysitter rather than laissez-faire parent.

But remember: These are choices, not enforced policies. You can choose to put your phone away in a cubby or not. You can choose to sit in a device-free section of the dining hall or not. If the College acknowledges — as I believe they should — the threat that technology and anxiety-inducing constant communication pose to learning, Harvard shouldn’t shy away from implementing policies that help foster a tech-skeptical student culture.

If we make the effort to physically and socially separate from the deceptively persuasive idea that people urgently need to contact us at all times, we might find ourselves more deeply engaged with our friends and learning.

This is what I’ve found when I leave my phone in my dorm: When I’m having a meal with a friend and they get up for a minute or two, I sit at the table reflecting on what we spoke about — instead of incessantly answering emails that can wait.

Amelia F. Barnum ’28, an Associate Editorial Editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Winthrop House.