"Alone Together"

During the four hours of "Alone Together" I did not use my phone for any reason, nor my MacBook, nor any other device used for accessing the internet or any form of social media. There was a point, probably about 2 hours and 45 minutes into this experiment, where I pulled out my phone. Luckily, I remembered to just shut my phone off which probably saved me from compromising the experiment. During this experiment, I spent my time in the company of my two very good friends, Parker and Kyle. When I mentioned to them doing this experiment, they were happy to participate. For the first hour and a half or so, we simply gathered in their living room and put on some music while discussing the events going on in the world today. The artist we listened to was Tycho, which is somewhat a mostly calming electronic listed genre of music. The thing of which we discussed the most was, of course, the election results and our over-all opinion of how our country, mainly President Obama, will continue to progress, or digress (hopefully not). Near the conclusion of that topic, we somehow got to talking about our thoughts and overall feelings of the new movie that came out starring Tom Hanks, Cloud Atlas. This part of the discussion lasted about 25-30 minutes mainly do to that fact that there was so much to take away from the film. If you ever get the chance or have 3 hours of free-time, I highly recommend that you go see this astonishing movie and if you do, make sure to pay very close attention to everything! To top the 4-hour time period off, we decided to watch The Amazing Spiderman, which is another movie that I highly recommend seeing. It's much better than the original with Toby McGuire.

At first, this experiment was hard to perform. This is due to all of us living in a highly developed digital world, where technology excels above all else. It was especially hard for me because I have a new smartphone where I have spent a lot of time customizing it with new applications, forwarding all email accounts to it, creating task lists, and let's not forget how addicting FaceBook is for everyone with a smartphone. It was almost as if I felt naked. The thought of getting an important call, text, email or notification, kind of put me on the edge. But once I began to occupy my mind with other things like our discussions we had, not using my smartphone was an easy thing to forget. I was also a bit more focused on my surroundings and much more observant. Having access to handheld technology is a fairly large distraction to many. I know that on many occasions (everyday), I tend to be trying to hold up a conversation with others while checking FaceBook at the same time. This could be due to my ADD but that is besides the fact. I didn't really notice anything different about Parker or Kyle's actions, but they did notice things about me in the beginning of the experiment where I was first coping with the loss of use of my smartphone. For example, I fidgeted a lot with my hands and was in constant motion of some sort most of the time. Again, I have ADD so this could be due to the fact I didn't have something to keep my mind and hands focused on, but this could be hard to determine. All in all, this was an eye-opening experiment and I'm very glad that this wasn't supposed to be a 24-hour experiment as opposed to a 4-hour one.