Fighting that phone fixation
Our addiction to the smart phone is now costing lives. Parents are so busy looking at their phones that some don’t even notice that their kids are drowning. Nearly 90 per cent of child drownings or neardrownings are the result of ‘‘inadequate adult supervision’’, according to the New Zealand Recreation Association. It says hand-held devices are the main culprits.
In this case, technological addiction can lead to tragedy. But there is a much wider problem.
Phones too often trap us in a sad kind of digital solipsism. The gadgets promised planetary communication with everyone and constant access to all knowledge via the internet.
The news media, of course, are part of this gigantic stream of information available in every phone.
Yet too often our over-use of this miraculous technology has shrunken our world rather than expanded it. There is now a widening revolt against phone addiction and the staggeringly wealthy companies that profit from it.
Some now call on Apple and other digital giants to take action against the addiction that they have fomented. This is odd, a bit like calling for the pushers to stop the addicts before they consume again. But perhaps it’s also a sign of how big the need has become.
One suggestion is that phones could be programmed to point out how much time users waste on it. It could time how many hours you spent on Twitter or Snapchat, and even rark you up about it. It’s like setting an app to stop you using your apps.
The obvious problem is that this strategy seems to collide with the giants’ own commercial interests. Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg promised last week to be good, or at least better, and try to prevent people wasting their digital time.
We’ll see what this means in practice. In the meantime, scepticism seems best.
Technology writer Farhad Manjoo argues that Apple doesn’t need you to be an addict, but merely interested enough to buy the next upgraded version of its phone. In the meantime, it can send out useful reminders to you that you’re wasting too much time on your current phone. Perhaps, but people should be doing it for themselves, and telling themselves and their friends that there’s much more to life than following Twitter and swapping inanities via Instagram.
There is a developing etiquette about phones, for instance. We accept the warnings before concerts to switch off our phones. We can hardly object to a loud protest from someone we’ve bumped into on the street while looking at the screen.
But we need to do more. How about phone-free lunches with friends and phone-free family meals? These are small acts of rebellion and mere gestures towards conviviality, but they’re a good start.
We should also admit that earlier attempts to tame the addictive force of television are not encouraging. Television-free family meals remain rare. But we have to begin from where we are, and who knows how big a small-scale movement might become?
How about phone-free lunches with friends and phone-free family meals?