The smartphone impoverishes our relationship with the body

Best-selling science fiction author Alain Damasio has never owned a cell phone. Which doesn’t stop him from having a strong opinion on the matter. In his latest essay, “Vallée du Silicium,” he notes that we have delegated knowledge of our own bodies to our smartphones.

“We have to admit that smartphones offer a feeling of power that is great. We feel like we have a better command of the world, of better control over things.” But this feeling of omnipotence, which helps to ward off many fears, comes at the expense of the body and our relationships with others, explains Alain Damasio in the Tribu program, ahead of his appearance at the Digital Dreams festival in Lausanne on September 7 and 8.

“A life spent caressing a window”

The writer points out that smartphones favor the senses of sight and hearing, to the detriment of touch. “It’s a life spent caressing a window. Touch in the smartphone era is smooth, unstriated, uninhabited, untextured. It’s not like touching bark, wood or earth. Everything has been watered down and put into a kind of second body,” in other words the phone. The author of the bestsellers “Les Furtifs” and “La Horde du Contrevent” emphasizes that the more this body is disinvested, the more it is monitored via devices. “The smartphone has developed a way of inhabiting one’s body that is very impoverished. We tend, paradoxically, to use a lot of technologies, blood pressure, pulse, fever sensors, that is to say connected jewelry, (…) which allow us to have monitoring of the body, this very body that we no longer really feel, of which we are no longer really sure.” As an example, we can cite people who need to look at the data from their smartphone to know if they slept well.

The comfort of the techno-cocoon

For Alain Damasio, another consequence of the massive use of smartphones is a form of disconnection from others. “We remain in this comfort of the techno-cocoon, which is very individualized, very personalized, but which does not confront an outside, an outside that we absolutely need (…) I believe that we need to be troubled. I believe that we need to be confronted with what is not us, with what is not familiar, and that this relationship with otherness really makes us richer.”

Author: Julien Magnollay/Tribu