Calling for More Amish Phone Booths
To evaluate your smartphone use, consider the religious values of America’s plain people.
There aren’t many moments when my smartphone isn’t within my arm’s reach: my back pocket when I’m walking, my car’s cupholder when I’m driving, my nightstand when I’m sleeping, next to my mouse as I’m writing this sentence, and, of course, in my hand when I feel the world tugging, or as soon as my thoughts become idled.
The only time I leave my smartphone behind is when I exercise. I run along a country road where I live, passing my Amish neighbors’ connection to the world: a makeshift shelter built at the base of a utility pole in a wooded area across the road from their plain, white, unwired house.
This is where my Amish neighbors use a telephone. That’s right, phone booths still exist. It appears more like an outhouse than Clark Kent’s changing room, but to the Amish, a phone is kryptonite to the sanctity of the home.
This phone booth in the woods is not one individual’s way to circumvent the ancient laws of his religious sect, nor is it one person’s restraint in the way a dieter pushes the Oreos to the back of the top shelf. This is the result of a collective decision made by the local Amish affiliation to set boundaries for individuals.
“Keeping the telephone outside the house symbolizes the community’s control over it while permitting limited access without intrusions into family life,” wrote professors Donald Kraybill, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner, and Steven M. Nolt in their comprehensive book, The Amish. “Such arrangements are an attempt to master technology without becoming enslaved to it.”
I just happen to always encounter my neighbors holding their phone captive in a cell while I’ve escaped on a prison furlough from mine. We both access our phones, although probably in opposite proportions of time and proximity.
Upholding Your Values
So which is the better way to use a phone? Well, it depends on your values.
It’s easy to dismiss the Amish as stuck in a 19th-century way of life, refusing innovation and progress for the sake of preserving community and deference to God. According to an Amish writer for the book 1001 Questions and Answers on the Christian Life, “Plain people do not oppose all new ideas and practices. There is a need to choose only those that will be of genuine benefit, and to reject those that break down the values we uphold. This would apply to modern appliances and household gadgets, many of which have the potential to change our family- and community-oriented way of life in ways we may not realize until the damage has been done.”
Generations of Amish have reconciled telephone use but for us non-Amish, or “English” as we’re known within Amish communities, we haven’t had enough time to realize the potential damage of smartphones. As recently as 2012 have a majority of U.S. adults owned internet-connected mobile phones, which is about the same time depression and suicide increased at alarming rates.
The Amish decide as a community which technology they use; the rest of us “rugged individuals” are literally left to our own devices.
Negotiating Technology
According to Kraybill et al., the Amish are adept at negotiating with modernity, seeking a balance between strict isolation and wholesale accommodation. Bargaining takes place both within the Amish community and between the Amish and the outside world.
This is what intrigued author Cal Newport, who consulted Kraybill and other scholars of Amish in a section of his book Digital Minimalism. The Amish, Newport found, start bargaining with the trade-offs of a new technology by placing their religious values first and then working backward to ask whether it performs more harm than good with respect to their values.
Newport concluded that digital minimalists, like the Amish, “see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value — not as sources of value themselves.” Newport suggested that when evaluating any optional technology that you allow into your life, such as a device or a social media app, it must:
- Serve something you deeply value (offering some benefit is not enough).
- Be the best way to use technology to serve this value (if it’s not, replace it with something better).
- Have a role in your life that is constrained with a standard operating procedure that specifies when and how you use it.
Screening Your Screened Devices
The smartphone offers plenty of benefits but some of the harms aren’t realized until the damage is done. Smartphones are distracting and they zap your cognitive energy. How many times have you picked up your smartphone to check something like the weather only to go down a rabbithole of notifications and emails? You then forget why you checked your phone in the first place.
But still, when I applied Newport’s technology assessment to my own smartphone use, it met the first two criteria:
- It serves things I deeply value: 1.) connecting with friends and family who, all but a few, can’t be visited with a horse-and-buggy ride; 2.) learning new information, which helps me solve problems and understand and influence culture; and 3.) taking action, whether through driving directions, paying my bills, or just doing my job to earn a living wage.
- It’s the best way to use technology to serve these values. The smartphone is the equivalent to an Amish roof builder’s tool belt. I can’t imagine replacing it with separate items, such as a newspaper, camera, alarm clock, checkbook, telephone, file folder, etc.
However, I can’t say that I have a standard operating procedure for my smartphone that specifies when and how I use it, other than, well, I don’t take it jogging.
The Phone Foyer Method
Newport has a fix, and it’s something he regrets not including in either of his books Deep Work or Digital Minimalism. It’s called the Phone Foyer Method.
Wrote Newport, “When you get home after work, you put your phone on a table in your foyer near your front door. Then — and this is the important part — you leave it there until you next leave the house.”
This method prevents you from reaching for the phone at every impulse or hint of boredom, and it restores your attention to the present moment and not the outside world. In essence, it’s an “English” person’s version of the Amish phone booth. The phone just happens to be inside the house instead across the road in a shack. And it’s close enough to answer in case a family member, client or boss calls with something urgent.
This is a better option than having the smartphone in your back pocket or constantly at your side competing for your attention. Turning the phone off or putting it in Airplane Mode doesn’t work either. A study from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found that the mere presence of a smartphone, even when it’s turned off and not visible, can reduce cognitive capacity, such as working memory and problem-solving skills.
In Conclusion
The authors of The Amish recognized the temptation of smartphones as a threat to the horse-and-buggy people’s way of life.
“Digital devices are more unpredictable and dangerous than automobiles ever were because, instead of taking an individual out into the world, the new gadgets bring the entire world, with all its temptations and resources, to the individual,” The Amish authors wrote. “What does separation from the world look like when you can hold the world in your pocket?”
Here’s a modest proposal if you’re not ready to completely reject modernity: leave your smartphone in one place in your house, preferably near the front door and not where you sit most often. Consider the space your “Amish phone booth.” If your willpower fails you, call upon your religious asceticism.
