There’s a telcom inspired reenactment of Wild West taking place. It used to be that cowboys checked their guns before entering a saloon. Now, teens and adults have to check their phones before they can enter the classroom and other venues. The company that enables this, Yondr, has been around since 2015 but it’s getting some deservedly good attention these days. DearSmartphone, which preceded this column, has cited numerous needs for checking phones before entering.
For those unfamiliar, Yondr makes a sealed pouch that a silenced smartphone is dropped into. There’s only one way to reopen the bag. It’s with a special key that resembles a mechanical can opener. Yondr says it expects to reach 10 million uses this year. The sealed bag has been used in schools, concerts, and churches. I first encountered one back in 2015- at the annual shareholder’s meeting for a large NYSE company. Visitors were escorted to a table where they silenced their phones and then handed them over – – it operated like a coat check.
Modern phones are mobile, and that’s why they need, like guns, to be put away for both safety and common law. Phones are probably the first technology to be able to interrupt, modify, or distract us whether on foot or on a bus. They also ‘break-in’ whether we sit alone or meet up with people. So, the Yondr bags are a workaround.
Sounding Off. Why?
But, it’s still interesting to speculate on earlier phones, when they were still tethered to a cord in the wall. Why didn’t they just light up, instead of making a jarring sound? Since Bell had invented the phone to help his wife and mother who were hard of hearing, later deaf, flashing lights might have been the more obvious solution. Instead, his noisy invention must have created a public stir. The ring would interrupt, jarring those who could hear it.
As the telcom network increased, in the 1900’s, an etiquette developed to handle the interruption, particularly in wealthier echelons. One of the duties of a paid household member, a maid or butler, was to attend to the ringing phone and screen the caller. They knew whether to seek out the householder, or come up with an alibi. There was a parallel in office environments, where a secretary answered the ringing phone and transferred the call to a higher-up. This set-up shielded the recipient from the ringing phone. They could hold their dinner party, catch up on reading, or hold a meeting without distraction.
Machine Learning:
So before we had the smartphone and the answering machine, a human intermediary functioned as the early Yondr bag. They locked up the phone, so to speak, and kept it out of sight and sound.
But, around 1990 a new feature called ‘ caller ID’ could be used to screen calls, or avoid them. Then in 1991 the answering machine was popularized, and incoming calls could be routed to the recording machine without first ringing. These technologies, in retrospect, ushered in an expectation for mobile communication. Travelers learned to remotely dial-in and access their calls from anywhere, say from a hotel room or the pay-phone at a gas station. Yet it took a phone to reach a phone.
Better functionality has evolved. Smartphones can send incoming calls directly to email, and have little toggles to turn on and turn off the ringing sound or make the phone vibrate instead. But the absence of sound does not keep people from being distracted. A phone in the pocket or purse is an attention magnet.
New Etiquettes:
But a novel convention has developed to silence the ring. Unless you are calling a close family member of business, modern etiquette requires texting a conversational partner before calling. Then a ringing phone is less of a disturbance, even if we no longer have butlers and secretaries to screen it.
When we learn to be mindful with our phones and more intentional, we, in essence, build a Yondr bag in our mind. We are able to seal off that desire and craving, or as Cal Newport, the writer suggests, we set a boundary- both when and where phones are unlocked.
There remain boundaries where phones cannot enter. Jails and prisons are notable here, not because the ring is distracting but because prisoners might violate house rules. Some employers, notably in warehouses and factories, ban phones because they could get in the way, distract, and lead to workplace injuries. Research labs that work with toxic materials will ban cell phones, not because of the ringing, but because a lab member can cross-contaminate substances if they touch the screen.
It’s all a distant cry from the Wild West, where the sheriff was there to check your gun as you approached the saloon, but for some of the same reasons, we have rules and Yondering to keep things quiet and notably, out of hand.