Science is a Form of Storytelling
This is a collaborative personal storytelling project between an assignment for Writing on Contemporary Issues (fall 2020) and DLINQ Intern Cyborg project.
In computer science, an object in object-oriented programming is an abstract data type that can be a combination of variables, functions, and data structures with the addition of polymorphism and inheritance (the properties and behaviors of an object vary based on the user, and a different object can inherit it with additional or modified behaviors and properties).
This probably does not make much sense to you (nor me if I do not consider it for a while, and I am pursuing a major on the subject — wish me luck), but what if I tell you that this concept is highly relevant to you and how you choose to live your life?
In 1994, Steve Jobs explained what object-oriented programming is using an example about laundry in a Rolling Stone interview. I would like to do something similar, but using myself.
I use my phone every day. I wake up to the alarms on my phone, shower with Spotify’s random playlist, and run with the help of a speed-tracking app. When I first got it from my mom around three years ago, who thought it was too big for her, owning the latest edition of the iPhone was cool and fashionable. (You constantly need to keep an eye on it so it does not get stolen and sold in the second-hand market and then mysterious pictures of oranges appear on your new phone.)
I do not have a fortuitous story about my phone. Instead, I have a long and steady relationship with it that I am occasionally proud of, for not damaging it physically, or functionally in any major way. It works well — it has reasonable battery life, good enough camera and audio quality, and a large storage space of 64 gigabytes. It is dependable soI do not need to worry about missing a class because my alarm didn’t go off or get triggered by mal-functioning app notifications. Like the toilet papers that get magically filled up daily in college, trash cans emptied, mail delivered, and all the services in life that we use, I got used to it. It is there, present, every day, but I do not pay attention to it. Rather, I pay attention to the messages that it reminds me of, songs it plays for me, or pictures I took with it, but not it.
So, I use it every day.
Really? Every day? I try to recall the last time when I spent 24 hours without touching my phone. That camping trip the past summer? I took pictures with it, and probably checked time too. What about that one day when I deliberately tried to stay away from it? A massive failure that I do not want to remind myself of. Every day it is.
I decided to run an experiment.
How much has my phone contributed to my daily routine? To what extent has my phone become indispensable to me?
I divided a phone usage period of an hour into 5 levels (see graph below), tracked the levels for each hour of the day with the screen time functionality on my phone, and recorded them onto an Excel sheet for a month. After color-coding the levels and calculating the mean, sum and mode (the most frequent value) for each hour of the day, I created the heatmap below (12am — 6am omitted as I am mostly sleeping, though admittedly not always).
There is no level 5 on my heatmap — I never used my phone consistently for more than 45 minutes last month! However, instead of a random spread of phone usage frequency throughout the day that I expected, orange-colored cells stood out to me at the bottom of the graph signaling a relatively higher level of daily phone usage at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, and notably, 4–5pm.
I certainly do not plan to use my phone at certain hours of the day. Why is my heatmap suggesting a routine?
I decided to investigate further. I created a circular time plot of Phone Usage Intensity (using R). (The unit of y-axis does not matter here since I only care about relative intensity, so either sum or mean could be used.)
Unmistakably, small upsurges of phone usage occur at 10am, 12pm and 2pm, followed by peaks at 4pm and 5pm, which gradually decrease until bedtime around 12am.
My scheduled events usually end by 4pm each day — I suppose that after a day of staring at my computer screen, I feel justified to switch to my phone screen to relax (ironically, I know). I also subconsciously give myself regular phone breaks in the morning.
I got a bit flustered — the control and autonomy I previously thought I possessed seem to be compromised.
What about weekly patterns? I again utilized Excel to create a calendar heatmap highlighting the length of daily phone usage.
I was relieved to discover that after classes started on 8 September, I had not used my phone over 2 hours per day. Despite the randomness that exists throughout the entire month, I noticed the three consecutive yellow-tinted blocks on Thursdays of 17, 24 September and 1 October, signaling relative high-rate phone traffic.
Although I did not sample enough data to generate convincing conclusions of a pattern, I suspect that after finishing three assignments due on Wednesday each week, I “decided” to rely on my phone more often than usual.
I did not anticipate this. My phone usage reveals to me a pattern of my daily life that I did not plan for.
My phone knows me. It knows my routine. It is part of my routine.
If you recall the computer science concept, my phone is my powerful but anonymous object. It has a high level of abstraction because I use it without ever knowing how it functions, how my pictures and videos are stored, how it is able to remind me to wake up, if I so choose. It exists for my convenience, comfort and entertainment. I do not pay attention to it, precisely because of its brilliance in design that allows me to enjoy the benefits without considering it. All its technical complexities are wrapped up in that little phone case with smooth edges, abstracting them, presenting to me the perfect representation (or distortion) of reality.
This experiment, however, makes me question how the object servicing me also controls me.
Objects of layers and layers of abstraction, containing systems and structures that you never need to know the logic of, support our daily activities. To give a little stretch, your university education could be such an object — you do not really know how and why it supports your life plan, but you enroll in the institution nevertheless and hope for the best. The airport is an object — you trust all the signs and labels will lead you to the correct boarding gate without needing to learn the complete layout. Vending machines are definitely objects — god knows why my crackers get stuck on the rack.
The consequence of such abstraction is oblivion — we do not pay attention. Sure, why do we need to pay attention when it is so much easier not to? After all, that is the entire purpose of abstraction — who has the time to get to know and think through everything (or in computer science, who has the time to read the entire online documentations of a function)?
However, what if you get so used to the object that it becomes part of your daily activities, integral to you? What if those layers of abstraction reduce people to functionalities, the essential workers that we collectively ignore until their essentiality becomes absolutely unavoidable? What if the object claiming to be a support system is actually one of oppression that disproportionately discriminates people based on skin colors in ways that you do not realize or even perpetuate until a dying man’s face is blown up on the screen under the knees of a man of a different race?
It took me three years to pay attention to my phone. How long does it take for us to pay attention to all the objects that we are accustomed to, abstractions we rely on, so we can wake the fuck up and make things right?
