A Mobile Proposal

Vauxhall Gardens by Rowlandson

A couple weeks ago, my old iPhone met its tragic end in a puddle during a torrential rainstorm. It held on to life for a little while, but it was never the same again. When I upgraded to a new phone, I decided to protect it with a case featuring an image of Thomas Rowlandson’s famous watercolor of Vauxhall Gardens from 1784. Life is good: not only do I have a working phone again, but I’ve also managed to bring yet another aspect of my life in line with my obsession for all things eighteenth century.

But my new acquisition got me thinking. It seemed fitting to pair my iPhone with an image of one of London’s premiere pleasure gardens, since eighteenth-century England experienced a revolution in social life, much as the invention of the smartphone has radically altered the landscape of sociability in the early twenty-first century. Pleasure gardens—which also included gardens like Ranelagh and Marylebone—were outdoor entertainment spaces where, for a small admission fee, Londoners from all walks of life could attend concerts, view exhibitions of art, people-watch from the promenades, and sip tea and order dinner in the company of friends.

Pleasure gardens were just a slice of the delicious pie being served to those who flocked to London for the social season. Among the “itinerary of cultural pleasures,” as John Brewer put it in his landmark study The Pleasures of the Imagination, were opera houses, the playhouses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, public assemblies, balls and masquerades at the Pantheon, and Almack’s Assembly Rooms. People gathered together in ways that were new and exciting, much in the way that the advent of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media apps have given us novel ways of engaging with each other anywhere, anytime. But, with innovation always comes new temptations and pitfalls. In Frances Burney’s novel Evelina (1778), for example, the eponymous heroine naïvely wanders into Vauxhall’s infamous “dark walks,” poorly-lit gardens where libertines, pickpockets, and other predators lurk among the shrubbery. It goes without saying that the Internet too has dark corners in abundance—their dark walks are our dark web.

Vauxhall Gardens Thomas Rowlandson

It is not surprising that Addison and Steele, the great literary tastemakers of the early eighteenth century, were keenly attuned to this revolution in sociability and cautioned against its misuse. In Spectator 27 (1711), on “the Love of the World,” Steele observes that men of the world and women of fashion “are wearied with the Toil they bear, but cannot find in their Hearts to relinquish it; Retirement is what they want, but they cannot betake themselves to it; While they pant after Shade and Covert, they still affect to appear in the most glittering Scenes of Life.”  

Steele’s words are prophetic for our own smartphone era. According to Deloitte’s 2018 Global Mobile Consumer Survey, Americans are now checking their smartphones, collectively, about 14 billion times a day. On average, people look at their phone 52 times a day, and 39% of American smartphone users believe they use their phones too much. While 63% are attempting to cut back on their smartphone use, only about half are successful. Kevin Roose’s New York Times article from earlier this year recounts his own attempt to break his iPhone addiction using Catherine Price’s 30-day guide How to Break Up with Your Phone, and the Wall Street Journal published an article last year reflecting on Apple’s “Screen Time” feature. The overwhelming consensus is that we are all wearied by the burden of our phones but cannot resist the “glittering Scenes of Life” that are only a click away.

Some of us—around 63%, to be more exact—search for a kind of digital shade from the glare of social media, giving birth to what Roose called a “budding industry” of “digital wellness”:

Some of those solutions involve new devices — such as the “Light Phone,” a device with an extremely limited feature set that is meant to wean users off time-sucking apps. Others focus on cutting out screens entirely for weeks on end. You can now buy $299 “digital detox” packages at luxury hotels or join the “digital sabbath” movement, whose adherents vow to spend one day a week using no technology at all.

Now you can even go on digital retreats. These services rehearse the classical topos of otium et negotium, with its dichotomy of leisure and business, country and city, all over again. Like Virgilian shepherds reclining under the shade of a beech tree, we seek rest in the real world, far away from our digital Rome.  

So, where do we find shade? We should look to the past and practice what Nietzsche advocated as history for the service of human life. The solution has never been complete retirement. The hermit is a recurring character in eighteenth-century literature, a cautionary figure illustrating the extremes of social disillusionment—the equivalent of a bad Facebook experience cementing lifelong misanthropy and flip-phone ownership. To adapt a famous saying of Samuel Johnson’s, when we are tired of Twitter, we are tired of life.

Typical eighteenth-century calling card

Perhaps we can begin to find the solution in Georgian England’s favorite Ciceronian formula: otium cum dignitate, an esteemed leisure. This is leisure—or, in our case, phone use—with dignity and moderation. Later in the eighteenth century and into the Regency and Victorian periods, when women (and men) travelled to London for the season, they managed what Frances Burney complained of in her diary as the “perpetual Round of constrained Civilities” with calling (or visiting) cards. In addition to the growing number of spaces for public engagement and entertainment, there was a thriving culture (especially among women) of paying informal calls to friends, family, and acquaintances. When you arrived in town, you would travel with your footman in a coach around to the houses of those in your social circle and could either leave a card with their butler to notify them of your arrival or ask if they were at home. If the lady of the house was not receiving visitors, she would be expected to eventually return your visit by paying you a “morning call” (morning meaning any time before dinner), which would usually take place in the drawing room and would last fifteen to thirty minutes.

When faced with a radical shift in the way friendships, relationships, families, and communities are experienced, we must find better, more fruitful ways to manage our busy social lives. They did it with calling cards, a technology that allowed them to create clear boundaries and expectations around delaying and managing social engagements. Part of what has made the epoch of smartphones so challenging is the same reason that smartphones are so convenient. Instead of traveling door to door with our footmen, we can respond instantly to a text or an e-mail. But with increased efficiency comes the burden of constantly being on call, the expectation that we will respond to each text within five minutes, each e-mail within the hour. Picking up our phone 52 times a day is as much an addiction as a social necessity. It doesn’t matter how many retreats and detoxes we go on, since we cannot cure our iPhone malaise unless we change social etiquette and expectations guiding our mobile lives.

I propose that we revivify the custom of calling cards, modified to suit our modern needs—perhaps that means committing to an hour or two each day set aside for catching up with correspondence, and having an automated response in e-mails or texts that indicates to our friends and colleagues that we will be available only during certain times of the day (Kirsten is away from her phone right now and can usually be reached between the hours of 12 and 2). Though, it is true that calling cards were often tools of duplicity and elitism (it was not uncommon to flaunt the names of important friends who had left cards, or to avoid an acquaintance you did not like by telling him or her you were not at home), we may still take the best of what calling cards have to offer: a more robust etiquette for managing our digital, social lives on a more humane timescale.