The Case for Locking Up Your Smartphone
Yondr
* * * France isn’t the first killjoy to quit the smartphone party. In 2015  the Canadian artist Garnet Hertz invented a cheeky device called “Phonesafe ” a masochistic lockbox designed to incarcerate smartphones for a set period of time. Hertz meant Phonesafe as a provocation  but the same idea quickly became a product. Today  you can buy similar  but mass-produced  containers on Amazon  and multi-phone lockers have become a mainstay in corporate offices and schools around the world. A McDonald’s in Singapore has even installed a locker designed to promote “family togetherness” and face-to-face conversation. If you attend a Guns n’ Roses concert or a comedy performance by Dave Chappelle  ushers will require you to lock your device in a neoprene pouch and take it into the show in that state.  The phone-locking pouch  made by a San Francisco company called Yondr   has a wide opening at the short end for inserting a smartphone. A magnetic locking mechanism  similar to those on anti-theft tags in retail stores  engages to hold it closed. After the show  this clasp is swiped across a counter-magnet  which releases the lock.  Yondr  is a surefire way to cut down on bootleg YouTube videos. In Wired  Alice Gregory recently took a tough look at the device. Gregory recounts her experience at a Chris Rock performance  where audience members waiting in the lobby had to forgo smartphone usage. The affair reduced them to “a roomful of jonesing fiends ” as she puts it. Ultimately  Gregory connects  Yondr  to a thorny question about civil liberties: the right of the people to keep and bear smartphones.
It’s an ironic conclusion  because  Yondr  is sold as a tool to provide freedom  rather than to take it away. To “Be Here Now ” as the company’s tagline puts it. It’s a promise to deliver presence—a tricky calling  to say the least. Presence has a long history in religion and philosophy  from Buddhist practices to the metaphysics of the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger. Today  presence is most common in the various mindfulness trends that have overtaken individual and corporate life  in Silicon Valley in particular—collectively the critic R. John Williams has called them “technê-zen.” Cutting through the history and the rhetoric  it’s productive to think about presence in terms of attention. You’re present where you focus your attention—and you only have so much attention to pay. In the case of Chris Rock  he wants attention directed toward him  live on stage. Rock’s show might involve awkward improvisation or new material that he doesn't want circulated online. Teachers are less concerned about copyright than comedians are  but they still demand attention. I have tested Yondr’s effects on mind-wandering in classroom experiments with Dan Smilek of the University of Waterloo Vision and Attention Lab. Our research is based in part on the assumption that instructors want students to focus on the course materials  and not on Instagram  Facebook  or other distractions.  Yondr  can be a remarkably effective tool for enforcing digital abstinence in these contexts  thanks primarily to  its  portability. Rather than locking away devices inside lockers  or even inside a disused Catholic tabernacle  as I have done in a performance piece   Yondr  buffers the anxiety of being isolated from your device.
Given that the mere presence of one’s smartphone can reduce cognitive capacity   Yondr  offers a way to surf between the waves of a device’s presence and absence. You can hold it  but you can’t use it. This might be an especially important balance in classroom situations  where students see a teacher’s “phone shoebox” as an unwelcome imposition of authority. * * * Needless to say   Yondr  is still an imposition. And controlling attention requires more than just locking a device in a binge-breaking neoprene pouch. Joelle Renstrom has reported the results of her own  Yondr  experiment in a class at Boston University  where she had her 30 students lock away their devices over the course of a semester. At first  37 percent of the students found the policy annoying  but by the end of the term that figure had dropped to 14 percent. Those are promising  if tentative  results  but Renstrom’s anecdotal comments about the experiment may be more instructive than the data she collected. Renstrom describes her students’ initial experience of Yondr as “akin to caging a pet  a clear denial of freedom.” Moreover  she observes that some students left their cases unlocked as a sign of rebellion  even though they didn’t remove the phones from them. Rather than becoming “active resistors to technology ” as the scholars Christine Satchell and Paul Dourish call people who choose to ignore their devices   Yondr  users are ultimately the victims of technological disenfranchisement. When implemented as a mandatory smartphone prophylactic   Yondr  becomes a means of control  not of choice  let alone of presence.
Such top-down tactics might be enforced easily at live performances  as one of my research assistants observed firsthand at a Chris Rock show in Niagara Falls. However  as a daily ritual for high-school students  all-or-nothing digital abstinence enforced by an authority figure seems destined to backfire  possibly leading to rejection—or even worse  a legal complaint. In an attempt to tackle this disciplinary problem  I have been offering workshops to schoolteachers that riff on and revise the design Yondr originated. In the workshops  I provide a kit that allows students to make their own digital abstinence case  but with an obnoxiously loud Velcro enclosure rather than a silent  magnetic clasp. This semipermeable design—the Resistor Case  I call it—is intended to promote self-regulation  not authoritarian control. The Velcro acts as a gateway to conscience: It provides just enough resistance and noise to make its owner think twice before opening it. Michael I. Norton  Daniel Mochon  and Dan Ariely coined the “IKEA effect” to name the increase in value people assign to self-made products. With the Resistor Case  I’m counting on a similar effect  that students who fist construct and then choose to make use of their DIY phone lockers might be more compelled to use them. Of course  the kit will only work if the teacher provides a context for it that includes a discussion of responsible smartphone use. (The kit provides a series of cards to prompt this conversation.)
* * * France isn’t the first killjoy to quit the smartphone party. In 2015  the Canadian artist Garnet Hertz invented a cheeky device called “Phonesafe ” a masochistic lockbox designed to incarcerate smartphones for a set period of time. Hertz meant Phonesafe as a provocation  but the same idea quickly became a product. Today  you can buy similar  but mass-produced  containers on Amazon  and multi-phone lockers have become a mainstay in corporate offices and schools around the world. A McDonald’s in Singapore has even installed a locker designed to promote “family togetherness” and face-to-face conversation. If you attend a Guns n’ Roses concert or a comedy performance by Dave Chappelle  ushers will require you to lock your device in a neoprene pouch and take it into the show in that state.  The phone-locking pouch  made by a San Francisco company called Yondr   has a wide opening at the short end for inserting a smartphone. A magnetic locking mechanism  similar to those on anti-theft tags in retail stores  engages to hold it closed. After the show  this clasp is swiped across a counter-magnet  which releases the lock.  Yondr  is a surefire way to cut down on bootleg YouTube videos. In Wired  Alice Gregory recently took a tough look at the device. Gregory recounts her experience at a Chris Rock performance  where audience members waiting in the lobby had to forgo smartphone usage. The affair reduced them to “a roomful of jonesing fiends ” as she puts it. Ultimately  Gregory connects  Yondr  to a thorny question about civil liberties: the right of the people to keep and bear smartphones.
It’s an ironic conclusion  because  Yondr  is sold as a tool to provide freedom  rather than to take it away. To “Be Here Now ” as the company’s tagline puts it. It’s a promise to deliver presence—a tricky calling  to say the least. Presence has a long history in religion and philosophy  from Buddhist practices to the metaphysics of the 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger. Today  presence is most common in the various mindfulness trends that have overtaken individual and corporate life  in Silicon Valley in particular—collectively the critic R. John Williams has called them “technê-zen.” Cutting through the history and the rhetoric  it’s productive to think about presence in terms of attention. You’re present where you focus your attention—and you only have so much attention to pay. In the case of Chris Rock  he wants attention directed toward him  live on stage. Rock’s show might involve awkward improvisation or new material that he doesn't want circulated online. Teachers are less concerned about copyright than comedians are  but they still demand attention. I have tested Yondr’s effects on mind-wandering in classroom experiments with Dan Smilek of the University of Waterloo Vision and Attention Lab. Our research is based in part on the assumption that instructors want students to focus on the course materials  and not on Instagram  Facebook  or other distractions.  [TGT]can be a remarkably effective tool for enforcing digital abstinence in these contexts  thanks primarily to  [TGT]  portability. Rather than locking away devices inside lockers  or even inside a disused Catholic tabernacle  as I have done in a performance piece   Yondr  buffers the anxiety of being isolated from your device.
Given that the mere presence of one’s smartphone can reduce cognitive capacity   [TGT]offers a way to surf between the waves of a device’s presence and absence. You can hold it  but you can’t use it. This might be an especially important balance in classroom situations  where students see a teacher’s “phone shoebox” as an unwelcome imposition of authority. * * * Needless to say   [TGT]is still an imposition. And controlling attention requires more than just locking a device in a binge-breaking neoprene pouch. Joelle Renstrom has reported the results of her own  Yondr  experiment in a class at Boston University  where she had her 30 students lock away their devices over the course of a semester. At first  37 percent of the students found the policy annoying  but by the end of the term that figure had dropped to 14 percent. Those are promising  if tentative  results  but Renstrom’s anecdotal comments about the experiment may be more instructive than the data she collected. Renstrom describes her students’ initial experience of Yondr as “akin to caging a pet  a clear denial of freedom.” Moreover  she observes that some students left their cases unlocked as a sign of rebellion  even though they didn’t remove the phones from them. Rather than becoming “active resistors to technology ” as the scholars Christine Satchell and Paul Dourish call people who choose to ignore their devices   Yondr  users are ultimately the victims of technological disenfranchisement. When implemented as a mandatory smartphone prophylactic   Yondr  becomes a means of control  not of choice  let alone of presence.
Such top-down tactics might be enforced easily at live performances  as one of my research assistants observed firsthand at a Chris Rock show in Niagara Falls. However  as a daily ritual for high-school students  all-or-nothing digital abstinence enforced by an authority figure seems destined to backfire  possibly leading to rejection—or even worse  a legal complaint. In an attempt to tackle this disciplinary problem  I have been offering workshops to schoolteachers that riff on and revise the design Yondr originated. In the workshops  I provide a kit that allows students to make their own digital abstinence case  but with an obnoxiously loud Velcro enclosure rather than a silent  magnetic clasp. This semipermeable design—the Resistor Case  I call it—is intended to promote self-regulation  not authoritarian control. The Velcro acts as a gateway to conscience: It provides just enough resistance and noise to make its owner think twice before opening it. Michael I. Norton  Daniel Mochon  and Dan Ariely coined the “IKEA effect” to name the increase in value people assign to self-made products. With the Resistor Case  I’m counting on a similar effect  that students who fist construct and then choose to make use of their DIY phone lockers might be more compelled to use them. Of course  the kit will only work if the teacher provides a context for it that includes a discussion of responsible smartphone use. (The kit provides a series of cards to prompt this conversation.)