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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

The smartphone’s ascent from novelty to convenience to necessity has been swift. And as these handy little Dick Tracy-like devices have graduated to the latter category for so many of us, culture and commerce have evolved to accommodate our perceived need never to be far from our beloved phones.

Even so, I was still caught off guard when I recently came across an article in Slate detailing a new product from those über-cool, über-cheap Swedish style-meisters at Ikea. The company’s new line of dinnerware, dubbed Sittning, includes placemats not only designed to look smart … but to hold your smartphone. The mats actually include a stitched pocket for you to store your mobile device during meals.

Here’s a company publicity shot:

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Reading the story and looking at that picture, I found myself having two diametrically opposed reactions.

My first reaction was a lament: It’s come to this, I thought, making a formal space for our technology at the dinner table—almost like setting a place for our little digital friend, never mind that it might interrupt the flesh-and-blood proceedings at any point.

My second reaction, though, was equally telling. I’m a bit sheepish to confess that I thought, That’s kinda cool. After all, I often feel an urge to look at my phone, even during times that I know I shouldn’t be. Like meals.

There’s no doubt technology has intruded into spaces in our lives that were once sacrosanct. And this placemat is the perfect example. But it wouldn’t exist if many people in the culture—certainly enough to give positive feedback in an Ikea marketing focus group somewhere on the outskirts of Stockholm—weren’t willfully surrendering spaces like these to the inexorable march of technological innovation.

But that surrender, as natural and hip as it may seem when presented with a product like this one, is still a choice that we’re making. A choice to grant our technological habits ever more real estate, to cross a relational boundary, so to speak, that we would do better to critique than to embrace.

Still, critiquing is harder than embracing. We can use our smartphones so much and in so many contexts that it doesn’t even seem like a choice anymore. It’s more than a habit: Our connection to technology has become part of the fabric of our lives. So it’s no surprise, really, that Ikea has taken that idea literally, weaving in a space for something so many of us consider vitally important.

In the end, pondering this new product prodded me to think about my own technological boundaries—and those of my family, too. We’re not perfect. Sometimes the phone wins. Sometimes it’s easier to pay attention to pretty pixels rather than the precious people in front of me.

But I don’t want to give my smartphone permission to become the part of the family that Ikea’s inviting it to be with this new placemat, cool as it might be. Instead, I want to keep growing as someone who knows how to use this technology appropriately, without treating it as if it’s more important than my wife, children and friends at dinner … or anywhere else, for that matter.