Smartphones: could we live without them?
How funny to think that we once regarded the Blackberry – or “Crackberry”, as many dubbed it – as addictive, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. The pull exerted by that humble email device was tiny compared with the “iron grip of social media on a smartphone”. Just how powerful the latter has become was made clear by a report last week by the regulator Ofcom. It found that, among the 78% of the UK population who own a smartphone, the average user checks their device every 12 minutes. People are spending an average of 24 hours online each week, twice as long as in 2007. Around 40% of adults look at their phone within five minutes of waking up, rising to 65% of those aged under 35.
I’m as guilty as anyone, said Harry Wallop in The Times. Thanks to the Moment app that records your usage, I can see that “on a bad day last week, I spent more than six hours on my phone, picking up the device 93 times”. Smartphones are invaluable for all sorts of useful tasks, yet they also become a lazy habit. Again and again, I find myself needlessly swiping the screen for a titbit of news, or to see if “my arty picture of a tree has been liked on Instagram, or to see how often my witty aperçus have been retweeted”.
So what’s the solution? Over the past month, Google, Apple, Facebook and Instagram have all unveiled features intended to allow people to better manage how they use their phones, said Rachel Kraus on Mashable.com. But these initiatives resemble the disingenuous efforts “to combat addiction enacted by Big Tobacco, Big Food and other industries that create addictive products – namely, light cigarettes and ‘fat-free’ food”. Rather than trying to reduce our dependence on smartphones and social media, we may be better off quitting them entirely. If people can’t bring themselves to go that far, there’s always “Scroll-free September”, said Jenny Eclair in The Independent. For 30 days, under this public health initiative, we’ll be “encouraged to put our phones away, talk to each other instead of texting, consign an experience to memory rather than Instagram and check the weather by looking out of a window rather than at an app”.