At a concert, the glow of screens rises before the music does. At a party, conversations pause mid-sentence as someone checks a notification. We’ve all felt it — the strange loneliness of being together. There is a claim that social media is upending our social fabric. But moral panic about technology is nothing new.  

How is the issue we face today different from the problems of past generations? Even Plato considered the invention of writing to be a threat to learning and that would create forgetfulness in the soul. Long before AI chatbots, doomscrolling and even the first manufactured car, Henry David Thoreau grew tired of society and withdrew to his cabin on Walden Pond.  

History suggests that blaming technology itself is too simple. A couple weeks ago, our assistant opinion editor, Cece, wrote that abandoning technology is not the answer to our problems. After all, cellphones have made us so much more productive. A smartphone’s ability to replace a camera, GPS, encyclopedias and calculator has saved energy, time and money. New inventions are more efficient –– that’s why we grow to rely on them. Do you think it’s a problem that we are dependent on electric light?  

Instead, it’s the trap of social media that most students detest and its tendency to discourage face-to-face contact. So how can we embrace technology but resist its addictive and dividing nature?  

There’s a new trend which has some members of Gen Z seeking out forced separation from their phones. The new-age Walden Pond comes in the form of locked-up cell phones.  

Phone-free opportunities are on the rise: from concerts to dance clubs, to sporting events. At phone-free events, guests lock their phones in secure pouches made by companies such as Yondr, where they cannot be used or heard until unlocked by event staff.   

Some young people even participate in tech-fasts, like one at St. John’s College last year, a small liberal arts school in New Mexico. A group of students locked up their phones for a week in an effort to avoid distractions created by notifications, online games and the pull of social media. Every summer a group of Yale students take a popular writers’ retreat in France that involves four weeks with minimal access to the internet. During the tech-fast, the students at St. John’s College reported feeling more productive and connected. The writers were surprised by their creativity and ability to focus and play.  

These situational changes in social norms seem to be not just welcomed, but highly sought after by Gen Z. It begs the question: if your phone is such a harm to you, why not just use it less?   

Young people are addicted to their phones and they know it, but voluntary disuse is not enough. When our social lives are on-line, it becomes much more difficult to get off-line. They don’t just want to put their phones down; they want everyone else to put their phones down too. One of the benefits given by a phone-free event is its ability to get a whole group of people to put their phones down, together. Phone-free spaces make face-to-face connection the norm again. Community –– not willpower –– is the key to unplugging.  

It is hard to imagine a successful phone-fast on Creighton’s campus. We are a tech-reliant campus. How would you find out about a snow day or a power outage without Creighton’s endless phone calls? How can you access your email without two-factor authentication?   

However, Creighton can support students by hosting phone free spaces and opportunities to connect off-line –– and students can do the same for one another. Try getting a group of friends together for a mini-tech-fast or a night out without the screens. Students long for permission to unplug. Creating a community around technology independence will be the only way to fight the addiction.