Put away the cellphone

A tradition unlike any other, the Masters golf tournament effortlessly captivated the attention of millions of Americans once again. The unofficial start of spring represents an almost sacred moment for passionate and casual golf fans alike. This year’s edition featured the collapse, comeback, and instant death victory of Rory McIlroy over Justin Rose.

But what caught the attention of social media, and I believe gave the rest of America a roadmap to rebuilding community, was the Masters’s no-cellphone policy.

Every image of the Masters looks like a 1990s photograph: a nostalgic callback to what once was. A world all too familiar and foreign at the same time. Why is that? It’s all thanks to the Masters’s no-cellphone policy.

Unplugged from their phones, people are engaged, paying attention, and believe it or not—having conversations with one another instead of bent over their devices mindlessly scrolling. Every image looks like a time capsule to a bygone age—arms raised in triumph, faces contorted in exhortation, and not a soul wrapped around his or her phone.

It’s no secret that the advent of the cellphone has been a scourge on community and social bonds. Children and adults alike now spend hours on end every single day pointlessly scrolling while ignoring those around them. Childhoods that used to be spent playing outside, sweating under the sun, are now spent in the dark in front of life-sucking screens.

Adults aren’t much better. Go anywhere in society and it's a challenge to find adults not bent over their screens, taking in the same number of dopamine hits in a couple of minutes that took an entire lifetime just a generation ago. It’s mind-numbing,

Schools are ground zero for the current cellphone battles. Everyone has good intentions. Parents, catechized by the anxieties of the age are skeptical of cellphone bans in case the unthinkable happens. At the same time, other well-meaning parents acknowledge the negative impacts of cellphones in educational institutions on children’s behavior, attention, and academic performance.

Many in the current political landscape scold the hollowing out of communities due to manufacturing moving overseas. They may be right. But cellphones deserve their autopsy, as well. As cellphones went from brick novelties, contained in cars, to all-in entertainment devices all the time, people and communities suffered the consequences.

We are increasingly alone or, as Robert Putnam put it, “together alone” in the glow of countless screens. The rise of TV and the suburbs may have put a damper on social communities, as Putnam suggests. Still, study after study continues to confirm that cellphones deserve their due as well: The advent and rise of the cellphone track with the increase in loneliness, decrease in social activity, and rise of atomization in society.

Social norms and restoring social order in the face of the cellphone-inspired anarchy could be the key to restoring community and a sense of belonging.

We should experiment with expanding no-cellphone zones all across our little platoons: with family, friends, churches, and other local associations.

Many families already have no-cellphone zone policies in place in their own households: at the dinner table, during family game night, or simply putting one’s phone away on Sunday (what we might call a Cellphone Sabbath).

These are all great places to start.

Then, maybe, if we prove the model works in the household and around our communities, we will start to make some progress in those entrenched school policy debates.

Little steps like these, when taken together, can make a big step forward in restoring community.