ZENtheRapper 02/20/25

Listening To: Mrs. Easton (Edison’s School Librarian)

Today in school, my 7th Graders had a digital literacy lesson where they were reminded to mind the humans involved in their phone obsessions. We use our phones to satisfy wants, needs, and worries. We use them to portray ourselves a certain way, to try to connect with people of similar interests, and – increasingly – to mollify our incessant anxiety. In her talk, Mrs. Easton talked about the lost art of the awkward moment. Kids growing up in this environment where phones and internet-mediated connections are a culturally and socially normalized phenomena – they are missing out on some of these hard moments in life that we have traditionally relied on to build character.

I think back to my experience… when my peers first started unlocking this heightened communication ability. We had flip phones, blackberries, and a pretty exciting variety of phone designs from the sidekick, to the rumor, to the juke, to the razor. If you are around my age, you may remember how much of a status symbol some of these phones were as they were coming out. 

Then, one day, Steve Jobs dropped the iphone.

And I think back to my experience again… this time in college. I remember a few distinct moments – in these moments, I felt like I had snapped out of some drawn-out torpor, like I had awakened to the reality that was right in front of my face, like I had come aware of how my sense of reality was being warped and worsened by the invasion of these screens into my life’s experience.

In these moments, I would – after putting my own phone down – look around the room and observe a group of human friends who were sitting next to each other, but were each in their own virtual worlds. These worlds (which I have been calling virtual) would more accurately be considered the stuff of augmented reality, because each of us were scrolling our individual and personalized (back when twitter was popular… and called twitter) twitter feeds to find things to talk about in the group. Talk about brain-washing! Augmented reality is like when the virtual world interacts with (invades upon) the material world, so that the user is half-here, and half-there, so to speak. 

Mrs. Easton’s talk was focused on social media, but as an educator, and as someone interested in my own continued self-education, my particular enemy is the screen.

The screen is the access point away from phenomenal reality, into a virtual conception of the world. A virtual version of your friends, of your peers, of your fellow humans. People share things on social media for a whole host of reasons, but the common thread behind all different stylings of sharing is the infinite humanity on either side of the screen. It’s a person trying to express themself in some way, trying to inch closer to their goals, trying to establish or strengthen connections with people around them. But all too often, the screen offers transport… transport away from here, and off to anywhere-but-here.

Humans need connections for their holistic well-being. Everyone needs friends, family, and love. Our phones, at this point, have sufficiently tricked us, in a similar way that a human might bait a fish with that which it needs to survive, only to use said need to further the destruction of the fish.

Screens… they have offered us access to easy relationships – relationships with no awkward moments, relationships that seem to satisfy a need, but in reality form the basis of our destruction.

As I watch kids navigate middle school, as their leader and as their educator, it seems like quite a few of them are taking the bait – hook, line, and sinker.

And as I navigate my adult worlds, as a rapper and as a writer, I see people who are being baited more and more cleverly – given premium bait that promises to satisfy their adult needs for connection that they call networking. People have been struggling with this kind of fight ever since Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, some of us – before even that.

So, today — at the risk of sounding like a broken record — I urge you to be mindful of your screen use. Be mindful of the ways it feels useful and satisfying in the short term, while degrading your sense of self and your sense of reality over time. I have a 7th grade homie who is helping me stay mindful of this by checking my screen time every couple of days. We got my weekly average down to about 5 and – a – half hours a day… we’re still working on it. There’s a U of I artist-professor named Ben Grosser who does awesome research about this very phenomenon. He has coined the term “doomscrolling.”

Read about doomscrolling here (but now while you are spending time with another human being): https://bengrosser.com/projects/endless-doomscroller/

Thank you for spending some of your “precious” screen time with me today, reading this blog post. 🙂 NOW-go! Go be human! Go have some awkward moments! Go get to know yourself and others!… the hard way.

ZENtheRapper ☀️♾️