Fitbit Ecology, Part I: Supplanting

The availability of a technology never simply adds or subtracts capabilities; it always modifies.

I'm preparing to use a "dumb phone" when at home, at my office, or on lighter trips. The first step I'm taking is keeping my smartphone out of the bedroom - just on the face of it, it seems strange that using it is the last thing I do at night and the first thing I do in the morning.

The first problem I had to solve was that my smartphone is my morning alarm. The simple fix is to use a classic alarm clock; however, my wife rejected that move after a day or two because the alarm clock is too loud. What we liked about the cell phone alarm was that it starts off soft so I almost always catch it before it disturbs my wife's sleep. I was sensitve to the sound, my wife could tune it out - credit to human adaptability! (As a side note, the Machinae Ex Deo Discord server has a "build thread" on making a better alarm clock, so perhaps I can take some microcontroller and make a better one eventually.)

Easier than building my own was using some old tech we had lying around. My wife's alarm is her Apple Watch, which vibrates instead of sounds. She had an old Fitbit that did the same. I found it, charged it, and set it up to work as an alarm. It works great... as long as I actually have the wherewithal to leave my phone in the kitchen when I go to bed. Nothing can be done without virtue.

In the process of setting up the Fitbit, though, I learned that it's possible to get some notifications, specifically, phone calls and text messages, forwarded from the phone to the Fitbit. This was good news! I hold that one of the better uses of the phone is supporting connection given geographic distribution and one of the reasons I don't do the very simple thing of keeping my phone farther away from me is so I don't miss those more important notifications like a phone call from my wife while I'm at work. Wearing the Fitbit while I'm at my desk would let me put my phone outside of arm's reach.

Both of these uses involve "more technology" in a sense. I'm using a second device when I previously used one. Does it mean that the Fitbit is a good technology, and the smartphone is a bad one? No—a conclusion like that is the result of utilitarianism. Part of clarifying how we think of technology is indicating that technology is ecological. At the recent New Polity conference, D. C. Schindler stressed the use of that word. The introduction of a species or resource into some natural setting is not simply an addition but results in a new balance of things. The removal of some species, again, is not simply a removal, but a new balance of things. What a technology is likely to do is relative to the ecosystem—the other tools, people, virtues, values, etc.—near it.

In this case, the introduction of the Fitbit was something that reduced my distraction, because of a combination of the device’s design and my own intention. I was able to remove both the need for the smartphone to be near me at night as an alarm clock and during the day as a family contact device. All good, right? Not so fast…