Letter #254: You Put Your Brain in Your Phone
The spirit of Plato lives.
Dad,
Most college kids who want to travel go backpacking through Europe; my version of this, as you may recall, was to sing my way around the world in Cole Porter’s old choir. That is a real thing which occurred. My first time in Athens, I was staying in an apartment owned by this lady who looked like a cross between Elaine Stritch and one of the villagers from Mamma Mia! We knew her because her nephew was a friend of a friend, a guy called—wait for it—Dionysius. I cannot stress enough that all of this actually happened.
My buddies and I used to go for runs whenever we got to a new city. We took our phones with us (they were some now-ancient model of iPhone) and marked down the location of our apartment on the map. Then we wove our way through the crooked streets beneath the Acropolis, which the Greeks built shortly before they invented geometry and logic. Naturally by the time we got finished we had no idea where we were, and naturally, our phones had died.
Panic. We had no way to call anyone, no way to find where we were staying. I had slept on the street in foreign cities once or twice before and I had no intention of repeating the experience. Desperate, we crept shamefacedly into the nearest phone store to see if we could bum a charge.
The proprietor was a balding man with a hairy spherical gut sticking out of his stained white t-shirt. Once he understood what we were asking for, he grunted in the direction of the chargers, then chased us out of his establishment, reasonably enough, as soon as our phones booted back up. On our way out he shouted at us (have I mentioned that I am not making this up?) “you! You kids! You put your brain in your phones. And then you do the exam...you get zero!”
Well, here’s looking at you, Greek Tony Soprano. You were quite right. The spirit of Plato is not yet dead in Greece, for it lives on in you. It was Plato, after all, who observed that what we rely on our technology to do, we forget how to do ourselves. In the Phaedrus, Socrates predicts that the written word—ostensibly a memory aid—will in fact degrade people’s ability to memorize things when they can rely on writing to record them. My friend and I thought we could navigate with our machines, which is why we never learned to find our way on our own. We put our brains into our phones.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the age when absolutely everything is recorded somewhere is also the age when nobody bothers to look anything up. We speak of “augmenting” our capacities with tech, but really it’s just as much about the capacities we lose when we hand them over to our machines. We should choose carefully which ones we part with.
Love,
Spencer
 | A guest post by
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This causes me to harken back to days of yore. One of my hobbies is visual astronomy. I started in 2000. My mentor Tom knew the night sky like no one else. If you forgot your star atlas, he could keep you going all night by saying, “why don’t you look at M 13 now; it’s just over here, look for these stars, and move down so much and look for a faint smudge and get your scope on it”. There were go to scopes even then, but they were expensive and prone to breaking down. One fellow had a very expensive scope, brought it about 8 hours from home to a famous dark sky site, set it up and found out the electronics had failed. He packed up and went home!
With findersopes and maps, I learned the night sky over several years, then got what are called “digital setting circles” or a computer that tells you precisely where to point the scope to find things. The new ones interface with an excellent map program on my iPad and makes finding faint things a breeze, but I still look things up and try my hand at finding things the old-fashioned way. I cover a lot more territory with the electronic gizmo, but have far more satisfaction tracking things down with a map and finder scopes. If my electronics go on the fritz, I’m not as good as I was about 10 years ago, but the skills are not entirely atrophied (yet). Tom died several years ago, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude. He taught generations of amateur astronomers in our neck of the woods. Find a mentor. Electronics are great, but for everything I gained, there are things I also lost.
I love the timing, as usual. I am visiting family in Tennessee and Georgia and used my husband's phone to figure out where to buy a few real, paper maps. Then I took a few minutes to read this post. My phone is happily almost 2000 miles from me and I love the distance!