If Technology Can Help Us Everywhere

The contrast in this photograph is hard to miss: a phone in the foreground, mountains behind it.

The obvious reading is also the easiest. Put the phone away. Look up. Be present.

But that reading may be too simple.

The phone could be showing a map, the weather, the next connection, a photograph just taken, or a message that matters. It could be helping the experience rather than interrupting it.

That is what makes the smartphone such a strange companion outdoors. One small device can replace a map, a camera, a guidebook, a weather report, a translator and, when needed, a way to call for help. It can make unfamiliar places easier to navigate and information easier to reach.

I do not want to give that up.

But the same device has a second function. It does not only bring useful information into the experience. It also brings everything else with it.

Work. News. Messages. Feeds. Notifications. Things that happened somewhere else, to someone else, or that can wait until later.

We have become very good at making more of the world reachable from wherever we are. The question may be whether everything else should always be able to reach us back.

That is different from arguing about screen time. It is about the boundary between one experience and all the others.

When I use a phone to find the trail, it helps me move through the place I am in. But when a work message, news alert or group chat arrives, the same device brings a different part of life into that moment. I am still standing on the mountain, but I am no longer quite as far away from everything else.¹

Perhaps disconnection is becoming valuable for the same reason connectivity once was: because it is not guaranteed.

Not being reachable does not have to mean rejecting technology. Often I want it with me. The more useful distinction is whether technology is supporting the experience in front of me or keeping every other experience permanently present.

The most valuable role of technology may sometimes be to help us reach places where we no longer need it.

If technology can help us everywhere, should we let it follow us everywhere?

Mariek M. P. Vanden Abeele et al., “Why, how, when, and for whom does digital disconnection work? A process-based framework of digital disconnection”, Communication Theory 34(1), 2024, pp. 3–17. The authors describe how digital connectivity can blur boundaries between social roles by making them less tied to a particular time or place, allowing contexts such as work, family and social life to converge through the same channels. They treat this permeability as ambivalent: it can provide flexibility as well as create “always-on” demands, and they find no simple, one-size-fits-all case for digital disconnection.