You have one new message... put down your phone

AFEW Sundays ago I received the first of what turned out to be weekly reports from my phone on my levels of addiction to it. To announce the arrival of these reviews, the device alerts me with a ‘ding’ and, like the dutiful user I am, I drop everything and rush to its side to see what it wants.

On this particular Sunday, it wanted me to know it had monitored my phone usage diligently over the past week and the results were in: my ‘screen time’ stood at two hours and 40 minutes.

I can live with that, I thought. Not such a hopeless addict after all. I used to smoke cigarettes for more than two hours and 40 minutes a week and they didn’t even have Spotify.

But I had misunderstood my phone’s summary. The two hours and 40 minutes was my daily average screen time, not the total for the entire week.

Some time in the past 20 years, a telephonic device I never saw any pressing need for before my employers lobbed me one has come to dominate my waking hours and, as we will see a little later, even a few sleeping ones.

And, lest you should imagine my stats are an aberration explained by addictive personality traits, let me assure you they fall well within the bounds of normal iPhone usage in the year 2018.

This week, the Radio 4 presenter Jane Garvey told the Mail she was ‘horrified’ to learn her screen time for the first week monitored by her phone was three hours and 24 minutes.

Twitchy

Those glued more securely than I to social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook think nothing of spending five hours a day staring at their phone screen – and it would be considerably longer for many if they were interested in spelling.

Miss Garvey talks of feeling ‘twitchy, nervous and stressed’ when she doesn’t have her phone, and the symptoms are wholly familiar.

I experience malaise even if my phone is in my pocket. Will I hear it if it goes? Is it on vibrate? Was that the WhatsApp ‘ding’ or the microwave? Is there a fresh breaking news alert? Better check.

All this, again, is pretty normal stuff in 2018. And yet utterly bizarre.

‘Was that you or me?’ my father will ask, with an urgency to his tone, if a beep sounds while he is driving his car.

In the days when men were men, they asked this question about something else entirely.

‘Who’s this singing?’ I will ask my daughter when an unfamiliar tune comes on the car radio, and within ten seconds her phone’s Shazam app has the answer. Modern wiring is such that reaching for it is the first instinct whenever anything is in question.

I use mine as a navigational tool and to take photos of products in shops to text to remote beings to check if this is the one they think I should get. I get the football results, monitor the temperature in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and listen to new albums without having to buy any of them.

The other day I even used it for a telephone call.

An entire generation of youngsters typically finds partners through dating apps on phones. They romance them with assorted heart emojis and miniature pictures of teddy bears.

Lovers’ tiffs are customarily conducted by text, too (angry emojis; kisses withheld) while relationships are today almost always terminated by iPhone. Why bother with an awkward summit when, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’, can be tapped out so expediently?

Who knows, perhaps in a couple of years face-to-face contact will be phased out of romantic liaisons altogether. It’s awfully time-consuming, after all, and some of it has to be done with phones down.

Interaction

Already the ways in which our phones – communication devices, for heaven’s sake – minimise human interaction are innumerable.

Online retailers would have us do our entire Christmas shop without a single guileless offer of assistance from an acned department store employee. I almost miss them. Coffee shops want us to have loyalty cards programmed into our phones to stop human baristas having to rubberstamp paper ones.

My bank tells me the only free accounts it has now are the electronically operated ones it does not have to employ sentient beings to help us with.

To get into this account on my phone I need only hold my thumb against the home button and it reads my print.

Which is why my nights are disturbed, too. I lie wondering when phone thieves will start a sideline in thumb removal.

And I worry, as many of us might, that I am becoming less adept at the human to human dynamic because so much of it is channelled through a gadget.

Those who spend upwards of two hours a day fiddling with phones may wish to run a simultaneous audit of time spent face-to-face with family and friends. The comparison may give pause.

No emoji works better than a real kiss, a real hug, even a real teddy bear. And no text brings understanding like eye contact – our species-wide shorthand. We’ll miss them when they’re gone.