For New York Magazine’s September 19, 2016, issue cover story, Andrew Sullivan examines the endless bombardment of news and gossip and images that broke him, and that has rendered us manic information addicts. “Did you really survive HIV to die of the web?,” Sullivan’s doctor asked him in the last year of his blogging life. A 2015 study of young adults found that we aren’t fully aware of how addicted we are: Participants thought they picked up their phones half as much as they actually did. “Has our enslavement to dopamine—to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak—made us happier?” Sullivan writes. “I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.”
New York print editor Jared Hohlt says that the cover, and the images in the piece — all illustrations based on paintings by Edouard Manet, Edward Hopper, and other artists predating the era of the iPhone and of much technology that we now can’t imagine living without — evoke moments of repose, contemplation, and maybe even distress that, with artist Kim Dong-kyu’s intervention (adding phones to these classic paintings) have been disrupted. “Now instead of wondering what the woman on our cover was thinking about, the viewer of these works may be wondering what news feed she’s frantically scrolling on her phone, or text she’s just read/sent,” says Hohlt. “The juxtaposition of old image and newish technology forces us to think about just how radically our human experience differs from the experience of human beings who lived only a couple hundred years ago, if that. It also forces us to think about how much of our time we spend these days not really occupying the physical (and hence perhaps mental) space we’re actually in.”
“The world is addicted to smartphones,” says Dong-kyu, who wanted to show that our lives have changed. “Smartphones emphasize connection and communication, but in reality, it seems that only severance and superficial forms remain.”