RAB Source Entry 2 – Nael Ottman

RQ: How does technology affect people’s attention span?

Part 1 MLA Citation: Roose, Kevin. “Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain.” The New York Times, 23 Feb. 2019. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/business/cell-phone-addiction.html.

Part 2: Summary

In the article “How I Ditched My Phone And Unbroke My Brain” Kevin Roose tells us his own personal narrative story of how different methods help him separate from his phone. Before, Roose wasn’t able to read books, watch full-length movies, or have long uninterrupted conversations. He wanted to stop these bad habits and used a 30-day guide from a journalist, Catherine Price, who authored a book called “How To Break Up With Your Phone.” To help restore his attention span and separate his phone from his brain. Roose took “mental speed bumps” to ask questions to himself before picking up the phone. He put on his phone screen questions such as “What for? Why now? What else?” to help him resist. Roose undergoes a “trial separation”, another mental exercise where he’s not allowed to use his phone for 48 hours. It helped soften his nerves and stretched out his attention span and felt like it was the “19th century”. He felt like that because he was reading, doing crossword puzzles, lit a fire, and gazing at the stars. He felt like Thoreau, an American philosopher as he was calm and relaxed.  Lastly, Roose gives us a comparison of his phone usage a day before and after the mental exercises. Before he used his phone for 5 hours 37 minutes and picked up his phone 101 times a day meaning his attention span was very short. After the mental exercise, he picks up his phone 20 times a day and just uses his phone for over an hour a day meaning increasing his attention span. Roose claims, “It’s not a full recovery, and I’ll have to stay vigilant. But for the first time in a long time, I’m starting to feel like a human again.”

Part 3: Rhetorical analysis

The genre is a personal narrative. His tone in the article is informative and inspirational. Roose used ethos by using Catherine Price, a journalist when showing the readers her 30-day guide and how it helped him. The target audience is phone users. The purpose of this article is to show the positives of separating him and his phone such as increasing his attention span. The source is The New York Times. It’s a credible source because A Reuters Institute survey in 2021 put the number of digital subscribers at around 400,000, and ranked The Times as having the sixth highest trust rating out of 13 different outlets polled. Roose is also credible because he is an award-winning technology columnist for The New York Times, and the bestselling author of three books: Futureproof, Young Money, and The Unlikely Disciple. This information is current. It was published on February 23, 2019.

Part 4: Notable Quotes

“When we started, I sent her my screen time statistics, which showed that I had spent 5 hours and 37 minutes on my phone that day, and picked it up 101 times.”(Kevin Roose)

“The biggest test came with a “trial separation” — a 48-hour period during which I wasn’t allowed to use my phone or any other digital device. “(Kevin Roose)

“Steve Jobs wasn’t exaggerating when he described the iPhone as a kind of magical object, and it’s truly wild that in the span of a few years, we’ve managed to turn these amazing talismanic tools into stress-inducing albatrosses.” (Kevin Roose)