Shortly before Restless Devices came out in 2021, a group of attorneys general from 11 states launched an investigation into whether Instagram, a social media service owned by Facebook (now Meta) “for promoting its social media app Instagram while knowing of mental and emotional harms caused by the service.” 1 Unfortunately, this is not a first but rather part of an emerging pattern, a string of concerns raised by Silicon Valley whistleblowers about the intentional (or at least known and ignored) negative psychological and social effects of social media. It is into this conversation about constant connectivity that sociologist Felicia Wu Song brings the insights of her new book, Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence and Place in the Digital Age.

In the beginning, this ubiquity seemed like a boon, but in recent years, more and more people have started to raise concerns about the seemingly inextricable role of our device and the types of connection it facilitates in our lives. They allow us to distract ourselves and to connect with others. Children tend to outgrow their comfort objects as they get older, but recently, I’ve begun wondering: has my phone become my (adult) comfort object? Not only do our phones serve as our telephone (that old-school device for voice-to-voice communication), they are also our navigation aid, our portable music player, our entertainment device, our internet access point, and our camera. He loved that stuffed animal-his comfort object. He took her everywhere (that she was allowed). When he was small, my son was in love with his chocolate Labrador stuffed animal.

Consumed by Felicia Fox