The #ashtag (or, how I learned to stop checking my phone constantly and love unfragmented time)
My journey back from Malawi took its sweet ass time due to nonsensical layovers and delays, and when I finally got on the underground at Heathrow, I was a little overwhelmed by all the goodbyes and how quickly ten weeks had gone by, and how unwell the rising sun looked in the pale winter haze of suburban London.
Usually when I get back to the UK after a long time away, I notice a lot of familiar things that induce a pleasant ‘oh yeahh, this thing exists, I’d almost forgotten.’ This time round, the one thing that stood out in my brief transfer from the airport to the railway station was the overwhelming presence of the hashtag. I think the combination of not having seen it for months, and the ubiquitous, wherever-you-turn quality of it caught my attention.
There were hashtags for everything - hashtags for drinking Jack Daniels, hashtags for visiting a museum or a musical, hashtags for theme days, campaigns, businesses, gambling websites, movies, social media crazes, witty political hashtags on the cover of an abandoned copy of the Metro. For someone who’s just got back from what was essentially a three-month internet blackout, it seemed like the fragmented way of communicating on social media had somehow encroached on the real world even more. Everything I saw was contained in 140 characters and prefixed with a #
What seemed particularly silly about it was how companies had really caught up and made use of the hashtag for their profit-seeking ends by coming up with clumsy and forced tags that sound like they were labouriously birthed by some media dweebs in a nondescript office. The abundance of branded hashtags obviously relies on there being masses of people who are interested in sharing the inanities and mundane details of their everyday lives to others in real time - people on their smartphones, constantly connected to the internet, promoting brands and products and ideas that aren’t their own.
Given that I did not have proper access to the internet for months, Twitter and other social media platforms became redundant, because they rely on near-constant participation in real time. Going on the internet was a CHORE - you had to leave the house, flag a taxi or a minibus to town, walk 10 minutes to the nearest expat cafe and pay a lot of money (in relative terms) for what was oftentimes an excruciatingly slow connection. The required amount of effort to access the internet quickly revealed the level of pointlessness that underpins much of what goes on there. All I ultimately needed it for was to get in touch with a handful of friends and family, to google a few things I needed to learn about (often a list of things we had argued about and had to be fact checked) and to fill out one badly timed Masters application.
The pointlessness of it all was made more poignant by how much time it took to get online - you had to waste an entire evening or a few hours of your weekend to access peoples’ photos of their lunches and pets. It made the trade-off between time spent virtually and in the physical world a lot clearer - towards the end I went online less and less (unfortunately the application made it somewhat regular still, but we’re talking like once every two weeks), and spent my precious free time going for walks, play-wrestling with my little brother, going to the market to pick up a missing food item or two for dinner or yogaing on a big roll-out reed mat we had in our back yard.
Having entire days to myself unfragmented by virtual reality was actually fucking fantastic. Getting up at sunrise, going to work, having lunch, spending your evening with people and going to bed without a single notification, email or a witty hashtag made me feel more present and mindful of what I was doing with my time. Having no access to the internet allowed me to become genuinely bored. I had to wait, stand around, kick dirt without being able to resort to the solace of a smartphone. I interacted with people with no electronic interference, and sometimes just plain existed on this planet, uninterrupted by little dips into virtual reality.
I have always been quite big on ‘being present’ when spending time with others, but Malawi has made me even more sensitive to people who use their phones in the company of others. I do it occasionally but make an active effort to stop - there is something inexplicably sad about sitting down for a coffee with a friend and having to compete for attention with a little beeping rectangle of blue light. I’m not saying nobody in Malawi was distracted by their phones, but I experienced a lot more of genuine, intimate human interaction and a lot less of eyes darting back to a phone resting on a table and sentences being cut off by loud and demanding beeps and blings.
Having so little time online was probably one big factor contributing to my good mood and general happiness. That’s why it’s a bit disappointing to notice how easy it is to slip back into old habits when internet access is no longer a matter of money, time and effort. I learned that I’m considerably happier when I spend no time online; why did I go back to being constantly logged on and signed in for everything? Still figuring that one out.
