3 Antidotes to Screen Malaise

Where Beachtown Bohemians seek refuge from the screen

In Beachtown Bohemia we have an antidote to the relentlessness of the digital landscape: public space. As a recovering urban planner (I practiced for 10 years in London and San Francisco before having children) I’ve found that I feel physically and psychologically better when I intentionally engage with public space on a regular basis. When I say public space, I mean places where people congregate that are not privately owned and where commerce is not the point (i.e. beaches, streets, plazas, and parks.) Perhaps the most therapeutic aspect of being out in public these days is its ability to summon me off my phone. Like everyone else, my phone often feels like the unruly appendage of my head: calendar, texts, emails, Instagram, ping ping ding ding. Out in public space, I’m released from this myopic viewpoint and into a world of the tangible — and my senses. I smell the eucalyptus draped along greying fences, hear the clip of my boots on the pavement as I walk to the studio. Out in the park, I observe couples on blankets and toddlers chasing chihuhuas. And when I go to the beach I take great pleasure in making fun of the tourists (por favor, a black Chanel bag on the beach is just embarrassing) and study the teenagers preening in thongs, and the old ladies with birding binoculars that cluster by the estuary. It’s a salve to be a flaneur. Scrolling Instagram has nothing on plein air people-watching.

In a town like Santa Barbara we have some seductive options, from beach to mountains to 200 year old plazas. And as an historic town that predates the invention of the car, we have — in most neighborhoods — great sidewalks. There is also, of course, the glory of a multitude of beaches - each with their own culture, geographic constraints and amenities. We also have well-used city parks like The Mission Rose Garden and Alice Keck Park. Below are a three genres of places where a Beachtown Bohemian can find refuge from the screen.

Streets are public space.

No 1. Streets (a respite from algorithms)

When I can, I walk to my studio after my kids are in school. Why do I find walking to work so medicinal? I find myself feeling fresh-headed and alive in a way that I don’t when I drive. I would argue that we desperately need an interregnum from the onslaught of algorithms. In

Kyle Chayka

’s spectacular book from earlier this year, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, we are presented with a thorough accounting of how our tastes in music, food, art, fashion are influenced by the algorithms embedded in the tech we all consume. For me, this was a reckoning with my own habits on Spotify, Instagram, Ebay, The Real Real and Instacart. In our screen lives, we find ourselves in a whirlpool of suggestions meant to bend our taste toward the lowest common denominator. I’m old enough to remember perusing a friend’s music collection in their apartment — I’d slink along their bookshelf and inquire “hey, what’s this CD?” That real-life exposure to the new doesn’t exist much anymore off-screen. One’s accidental encounters with something life-changing doesn’t transpire without the algorithm’s role as a digital dueña — a bossy guide who tosses you what they think you want. In public space, we discover what we want on our own. Shopping in downtown Santa Barbara, I am returned to the world before algorithms — I may see something in a window, on a fellow pedestrian, or happen upon something in a plaza — even if I don’t enter a shop, it’s an enriching experience. Observing people on the street is one way to participate in culture without needing your phone.

The Mission Rose Garden

No. 2. Parks & Beaches

I love people-watching in parks and at beaches. I suppose I like to people-watch online too, but but it’s different in person. I am reminded in public space of my place: one of many, connected to a heterogeneous melange where my extra 5 lbs is of no significance, nor my quibbling children, nor the color of the bathroom walls or any other minutiae of my mind. Another reason to love public space is to loosely mingle with people unlike yourself. I live a few short blocks from Santa Barbara’s Mission Rose Garden, an historic plot of land adjacent to the town’s circa 1786 Spanish Colonial edifice. It is large and sloping with a volunteer brigade of gardeners who manage the many beds of roses. I would argue that The Rose Garden here is a more democratic space even than Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow. All kinds of Santa Barbarans feel ownership in using it. I have seen, on a warm August evening, Latino families celebrating a Quincincera in full party regalia complete with balloon archways, large groups of man-bunned stoners playing cornhole, elegant elderly couples lounging on Pendleton blankets with wine chilled in a bucket, baby showers for boho women in identical ditsy print dresses under fringed beach umbrellas, and kids like mine — shoeless on the soft crabgrass — rolling like redwood logs down the slope from the hilltop to the rose beds in peals of laughter. This is what unscripted cultural participation feels like. It’s about being civilized, and separate, in unison.

The beach is a sort of Beachtown Bohemian church.

No. 3. Walking as rebellion

The world outside your phone is largely unmediated. Our cars, however, separate us from the granular human scale we are built for (are we not meant to be upright, pedestrians?) When I began my career in urban planning it was a result of discovering that I love walking in cities. I love studying, observing, and thinking about the built environment. I rely heavily on my car, but when I drive somewhere, it’s like wearing a condom. Inside a car you are once removed, unable to sense the nuances of a place. Walking is direct contact, senses engaged. Humans are meant to live in contact with our environment and one another, not heads down staring into a screen. We are meant to walk like we are meant to sit around the table at dinner and talk. These are human-scaled sensual experiences that the car first took from humanity and is now doubly imperiled by the hegemony of the phone. I know we need cars and phones, but in equal measure we need not be defined by them.

I realize not everyone lives in a walkable community. And that some places are not safe for walking. But for many of us, we have simply grown complacent since the advent of the phone. The OG community is not online. It’s down your street, out in the park, messing around on the sandstone fence at Butterfly Beach. Public space is the medicine I administer when I come to terms with the fact that my phone is turning me into a navel-gazing, neurotic dullard. I find it good to get out of my head — not only solo-out-in-nature a la Thoreau, but to remind myself that we are part of a culture, a neighborhood, a city, a country full of people — a public sphere that desperately needs our participation. Or at least our delight in being an unplugged flaneur for an afternoon.

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