Well when I’m teaching lessons nobody can bother me in the middle of the lesson. I can devote my attention to my students entirely for the full lesson without any interference. That’s the way it should be. You don’t want your teacher answering the phone in the middle of your lesson. That’s just bullshit!

Oh c’mon they get computer days all the time even when they’re not supposed to. In order to satisfy our son and daughters needs for some kind of device we got them an actual a digital Walkman from Sony. It looks like a mini Ipod shuffle and it’s for listening to music. Our daughter loves her Walkman. I don’t know if I’m going to allow them cellphones as they get older. Our son got a tablet from his after school program and that thing was the vain of our existence for weeks because he would be on there for 7 hours straight and not even notice. It’s bullshit. He has like an obsessive personality in a way. Our daughter is less obsessed with stuff. But he’s screaming at us and throwing fits if we try to take the tablet away. It’s totally signs of addiction, totally. That is why we set rules. They’re allowed 3 and ½ hour slots with their technology on the weekend, on a Saturday or Sunday. They’re allowed a half-hour on Friday night, even though it’s not a school night. My son does some of his homework on the computer if he has to send it to the teacher. And sometimes like yesterday we had one hour in between where I had to drop my dad off and my wife wasn’t home yet so they were allowed to go on the computer during that time. So they get extra time during the week you better believe it. Even though our official rule is no computer on school nights AND there’s no computer when they have a friend over. You’re going to play games, my daughter and her friends get the stuffed animals and make imaginary worlds, that’s where its at man. Pretend, play, there’s an expression “children’s work is their play”. That is their work, their developing, their imagination, their brains. Staring at a screen doesn’t give them anything. Fucking zombies man. I mean most of the parents they feel the same as I do at the school and we all agree as parents that this is our biggest challenge in todays generation in our generation of parents is fighting these god damn screens. When I was a kid there was a TV that was the only screen my parents had to fight. We sneaked it plenty, there was no remote. If we heard my mom coming we had to jump up, turn it off, and run back to the couch and look like we were just sitting there. The other thing I’ve noticed is that parents give their TODDLER their phone to play with! I think what happens is that I believe it’s an easy way out, but you’re not being a parent then. There are studies that show its bad for the children’s eye-sight. And it stimulates the pleasure area of the brain, it’s a drug. They’re winning the game or getting likes on your post. One British musician said its all bollocks all these likes.

I have a home computer, and an Ipod classic that my mother in law gave me for only listening to music. I have 630 of my albums in there already so it’s nice for me to have it to teach workshops. I have a first generation Ipad that I turned into a giant sheet music reading device, which is pretty much all I use it for. I have guitar stuff, guitar processing devices to use for playing performance music. I know one person that said even though they can stream all the music they want, at the end of the day they don’t own any of the music so if they stop the subscription service they can’t listen to the music. I’ve been collecting music my entire life. I have records and tapes and CDs, why should I pay for it all again? I’ve got a giant amount of music here at home. I mean no one can listen to every single record right every single artist. For the CDs I’ve got an external hard drive, I put it in the Ipod and then the records some of them I was able to get the tracks off YouTube and some of them I actually played from the record player in my small handheld digital recording machine. Everything I have is really geared towards music. On my computer I have Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, I don’t even know why I have Tumblr I should probably get rid of it. I don’t know why I have Twitter. I use Facebook a lot because a lot of my friends and students send me emails through the Facebook messaging system. I use it to promote my gigs. If I don’t have a gig, I don’t really post that often.

Sixteen students. I used to have twenty or more. I used to four or five a day, not one or two a day. You can’t make a living off of one or two a day. I used to make like 300 or 400 bucks everyday from guitar students. But 2008, it started sliding down and just got less and less and less. I used to make 40,000 a year and I make 14,000 less than that now. 2016 was the first year in a very long time that I didn’t make less than the year before I made the same. It sucks. I’m not happy. I’m always stressed out about money, always. I got kids, and a mortgage and my wife works you know but it’s not enough. And a lot of this is due to technology, you know. So that’s the part I don’t like, of course.

Never, I have no desire to purchase a phone WHATSOEVER, it has no temptation to me WHATSOEVER. Every time I see an ad on television for a phone I’m like MUTE. I go it’s another phone. I mean some of them look beautiful the galaxy is a very nice piece of technology. Now what about the waste. You get all of these new models, where do the old ones go? Where are the billion old phones? Where are they? My wife is in recycling, she has an environmental job and her group processes 60,000 pounds a month of compost on Governor’s Island. You know its illegal now to throw electronic waste or E-waste into the garbage. So they have to recycle it, but do you also know about polishing the screens of these Iphones and Ipads in China? They force these people to work too many hours and some of the people can’t use their hands anymore because they force them like slave labor to polish these screens until their hands don’t work anymore. Even some of them tried to commit suicide by jumping out of their balconies where they force them to live in these dorm type apartments and they put nets to catch them so they can’t kill themselves. That’s another reason why I’m like NO THANK YOU. Well I have an Ipod and I have this old Ipad, but at least I’m using it for something positive.

I’m 53 years old. I went to college from 1982-86 at Tulane University in New Orleans and then transferred to Long Island University in Brooklyn. I have a BSA in Jazz studies and now both teach and play guitar.

Both— It’s negatively impacted my income. I’ve lost 14,000 a year on income because of it. Because people don’t want guitar lessons when they can get it for free on Youtube. Weddings, parties, all kinds of other gigs like art openings or various forms of gatherings that people have, in the old days you would have a little trio or something in the background. But people don’t have that anymore. But, it is easier to promote yourself with technology. The other sad part is let’s say I wanted an obscure record that was out of print. If you found it one day in a huge record store there was a feeling you got of “oh my god I found it!!!!!”. You don’t get that anymore its like Oh I go online buy it from a used record dealer, oh I got it, great. You lose the mystery. The joy of discovery. I mean, forget about dating. When I was growing up if you answered an ad in the back of a newspaper it was not acceptable. You didn’t tell anyone you did that. It’s really hard to say, can we use technology and not be addicted to it? I don’t know.

I don’t know man. It’s a choice they have to make for themselves. Some how they have to become aware that they are addicted and that it is too much, but the problem is what do you do, how do you live if that’s all you know. I would start with small things, like if you are sitting together at a bar or at a restaurant as a group of four or five people, turn the damn things off and talk to each other for Christ sake! I read there was a rule that this one group came up with that you had to look up every certain amount of minutes. There was a very interesting study I read, one restaurant analyzed why was it taking two hours for a customer to sit down eat and leave when it used to take one hour and customers were complaining about service. So they took their security footage from 10 years prior and they watched it and they looked at what was happening and they found out some very interesting stuff. So people come in, they sit down, they’re on their phone. Then the waiter comes 10 or 15 minutes later “oh sorry I didn’t look at the menu yet”, then they go away. They come back, they order the food, or the waiter has to take a picture of them as a group together in the restaurant, right. Then they order the food, the food comes, they’re still on the phone, then the food gets cold and they send it back to get warmed up. And then they don’t pay because they’re taking pictures of the food, posting it on Facebook. So then the restaurant started saying leave your phone at this basket at the front and you will get 5% discount on your meal.

Well technology-free might be a bit, but reduced. Use it less, get off it. Smell the fucking roses or something. Because I think that living only with technology is not living. You’re not experiencing life in the moment. If you’re filming a concert, you’re not experiencing the concert. You are not living life. There’s a very interesting story about a guy that rescued a concentration camp in world war two. He was filming the cleanup of that horrible thing, and because he was filming it, he was one step removed from the horror that was going on around him and he said he never ever watched the film himself, he couldn’t do it. Now this shows you that when you are filming something, you are removed, you are detached from fully being in the moment and living life. It’s just so important to get off this stuff and you know look at each other, stop staring at the phone. I find it to be very disturbing.

Well the thing is the reason that it works for me is because I work at home during the day. You can call me you can email me but once I’m out, you have to stick to my 24-hour cancellation policy, which is a good thing for me. it forces the families that I teach to stick to it. They can’t cancel at the last minute on the same day because of the stupid cell phones. I hate that. If the kid is sick, that’s an acceptable excuse, but I don’t tell them that in advance because I don’t want them to abuse it. Most families are pretty good about it. But overall with society people are staring at their phones all the time. I call it anti-social media. They’re sitting at home alone with a computer and they’re not with anybody. Most of my friends at this point are people with children like the parents at the school. So I see them everyday, pick-up, drop-off, we have a directory with all of the parents and if I want to talk to them I call them up. I don’t hang out, I don’t go out to bars, I’m too tired. I go out when I work or when I play a gig or when I teach lessons.

I’ve never owned a cell phone ever. At the beginning of cell phones, we read an article, my wife and I, in the magazine about health. This research was stating that the phone companies were hiding the fact that the microwaves used to make phones were unhealthy. So at that point I was like forget it I’m not getting a phone, I don’t need one. The other thing is that if you look at the diagram of an adult brain using a phone and a child’s brain using a phone the electromagnetic frequencies penetrate more deeply into the child’s brain than in the adult brain because their skulls are thinner because they’re still growing. So I was like our kids are not having phones either they don’t need one. My wife also believes that if you use your phone as a GPS tracking device for your teenager, that demonstrates a huge lack of trust in your kid. I mean our son has screwed up twice on appointments, he was supposed to go to a therapist once and he was supposed to meet me once, but he felt bad about it and knew he screwed up and that was that! There’s a very interesting website called Free Range Kids, a lady on the Upper West Side is promoting this idea and one of the thing she says is that the fear of child snatching is very, very high, but the statistics on actual numbers of child snatching is extraordinarily low. So the fear is much more than the reality of child snatching. You know in the 70s it was much higher, the actual incidents of child snatching. Our son is almost 12 and has been going on the subway by himself to school for ages now.

Oh I don’t know, I think it’s just a continuation of my general view on life before we had this stuff. I’ve seen the addiction of these phones grow and you know not having a cell phone I’ve sort of been on the outside of it. I walk down the street and I look at all of these people staring at their god damn phones. I’m just like people stop!!! What about that its always in their hand! It’s in their hand like its some sort of talisman against evil or something. People if they don’t have their phone they start panicking you know. They freak out. I mean I’ve always been a left wing, wanna-be hippie sort of guy you know. I mean look if you’re stuck on the highway I think that’s one of the best usages of a phone I can think of. I know another parent a friend of mine, and he doesn’t have a cellphone either. Although he did get one recently from one of his relatives and he deleted every single thing on the phone that you could possibly delete except the camera. He’s using it only as a camera. He didn’t buy a Wifi plan or anything. In Europe, they started putting red and green lights in the pavement because a young woman got killed from a train because she was on her stupid phone. There was an expression growing up called camera shy. That doesn’t exist anymore. I see people framing a shot and then they take it again and again, fluffing their hair, until they get the perfect one. We’re turning into a society of narcissists.