Are Smartphones Making Us More Connected?
In just a decade, smartphones have simply taken over our daily lives. Books have vanished from public transportation. At the restaurant, couples, their eyes riveted onto their screens, take pictures of their food, too eager to share this privileged moment with their social networks. At home, at school, at work, in the street, your hand often goes for this small object with no specific reason in mind, and your heart sinks if it’s almost out of battery. We are all “more connected”, but connected to what precisely?
This is an eye-popping topic that we hear relatively little about. Let it be said from the outset that smartphones have brought us an incredible number of comforts… And since we’d find it very difficult to deprive ourselves of these comforts today, it does make criticism more difficult. Phone, watch, camera, GPS, diary, alarm clock, music player, mailbox, dating, flashlight, meal delivery, taxi, banks, games of all kinds, social networks, and more generally, the Internet. All in one tiny object that you can always keep with you, decorate, personalize, tame, and brandish when needed! So, something between the Tamagotchi, Harry Potter’s magic wand, and a little bit of Gollum’s precious.
If this technological game-changer is not really new, it is not that old either, and we are only just beginning to understand its repercussions from an anthropological standpoint. Far from being just tools at our service, smartphones are modifying us. Interested? Buckle up!
Smartphones: a phenomenon hiding many others
The first iPhone was released in 2007 in the United States. Fifteen years later, 95% of the French population aged 15 or over say they have a cell phone and more than 80% of them declare having a smartphone. On the scale of human history, we have rarely seen a technological innovation be adopted so suddenly and intensely in the daily habits of everyone. And we are the generation that saw this game-changer unfold before their eyes, probably the last one to have experienced a world without smartphones, and therefore also the one most able to question the multiple mutations involved in such a technological revolution. For if we must live with our time, it should not prevent us from trying to understand it, so as not to just suffer it.
Especially since from a chronological standpoint, we have observed other phenomena take off in a disturbing parallel. Probably the most apparent one of them being the huge place that social networks have taken in our lives. Smartphones are, after all, their main tool. They’re the recorders, the emitters, and the receivers of most of the content shared on social networks. And another phenomenon, of course, that almost goes hand in hand with it and is of particular concern to us at Bodyguard.ai: online hate. But that’s not all. The average IQ, after rising steadily in the 20th century, is dropping in the West. In 2010, a study estimated the attention span of the average human at 12 seconds. In 2015, a similar study, conducted by Microsoft, found that this average attention span had dropped to 8 seconds and was steadily decreasing. Likewise, our memory capacity, which we know is strongly indexed on the usefulness or the need that we could feel to remember something, has dropped considerably. From that to establishing a direct link with our intensive use of screens/smartphones? It looks like it.
Neuroscience experts simply speak of a reconfiguration of the human brain to adapt to its digital uses. Better at dividing its attention between multiple objects, less able to focus on the same task for long, the human brain increasingly resembles a computer window with dozens of tabs open. No need to memorize a lot of things either: “there’s Google”. Our smartphones have become like the outer appendage of our brain.
We’d be tempted to say that one form of intelligence replaces another and that there’s no real loss. Especially since, after all, we are now able to mobilize infinitely more knowledge in record time, everywhere and all the time, thanks to our smartphones. One could even argue that thanks to them, we are virtually much smarter than our ancestors. Except that if we look back on human history, one or two worries may arise. Didn’t the greatest artistic works or the greatest scientific discoveries emerge from nothingness precisely thanks to the colossal efforts of concentration and perseverance that their authors put into them? Precisely the human qualities which are eroded by our intensive digital use according to scientists… Here’s a question that is both futile and interesting: would Victor Hugo, Shakespeare or Mozart have given birth to the same masterpieces with a smartphone vibrating every other second in their pocket?
We are “all more connected”, but to what?
Connected to ourselves? The permanent connection through our smartphones is also a permanent intrusion of the noise from the outside world, even in our moments of break, which does not really feed the narrative of a stronger connection to ourselves. In fact, smartphones deprive us of the rare moments of solitude and introspection that we could use to recenter ourselves. So much so that more and more people now find those moments of silence almost abnormal or even anxiety-provoking. Connected to the present moment perhaps? Again, the loss of concentration, the addiction to distraction, the obsession with taking pictures of everything to then post it on social networks, all of these do not really go in the direction of a full presence to the moment. Connected to nature? This one is easy: rather to screens, to technological comfort, and to the digital world as we wait for the metaverse.
Connected to others then? Well yes, and no. We are connected to many more people of course (although often rather connected to the image they project of themselves if we talk about social networks), but not necessarily to the people right around us, who’d normally deserve our attention. And this connection is not at all of the same nature as if the person with whom we were “connected” was in front of us. A proof of that could be the tidal wave of thoughtless, indecent, idiotic, rude, cruel comments that abound on social networks or elsewhere on the web. Would these same people have allowed themselves this type of comment if they were in front of the one who was going to receive them? You don’t need a lot of imagination to know that for most of them, of course not. Connected to ideas then, to the debate happening in society, to the democratic life? In a hyper-sensitive, partial and hostile way yes, but try to initiate a somewhat complex and nuanced discussion on social networks and then come back to me. The majority of comments on the web are composed of less than seven words, one can suspect that there is not much room for really elaborate ideas.
Connected to the outside world? Yes, but to a certain world and in a certain way. A digital world, very focused on image, and in an often-passive way, which tends to distance us from it, to “derealize” it and to desensitize us. We receive a lot more information than before, of course, we consume content, we comment on it, and we watch the lives of others, but with, each time, between that world and us, a screen. It’s almost like we’re going through a bit of the same process as the AI character played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson in the movie HER: we absorb so much information, that after a little while nothing moves us anymore. Less than a century ago, news of a flood in Italy or a war in Spain triggered an immediate reaction of solidarity from thousands of foreign volunteers, who did not hesitate to rush to the assist. If we draw a parallel today with our reaction to the Ukrainian ordeal, one can wonder if, in the end, we are not less connected to the world than our ancestors, or if we do not live this connection much more lightly, or with more distance and resignation.
The non-stop screen: a problem of posture facing the world
I’m not talking about the posture of our spine, even if it is also severely damaged since we are all continually bent over our devices. The physios are alarmed. Let’s also pass quickly over the temptation of im-posture, quite inherent to our use of smartphones and social networks. Imposture of the image we project to all those with whom we are “connected”. Young people in particular (although not only them) are having a harder and harder time to face reality and to assume themselves as they are. They’d rather invest in the virtual world in order to sell fantasies, knowing that telling stories to others is always a good way to convince oneself of the same stories in passing. And the more the gap between fiction and reality widens, the more difficult it becomes to assume a return to reality. Imposture as well regarding the excuses and the good reasons (there’s always one to be on our smartphone) that we state to ourselves as well as to others when they openly regret seeing us riveted onto our screens.
But what seems to me even more crucial regarding the impact of smartphones on our habits and our mentalities is that the incessant flow of distractions that comes with them seems to have plunged us all together into some kind of torpor and a passive posture facing the world. No need to go to the world, it comes to us, right into our pocket, sometimes to the point of nausea. Our smartphones seem to have transformed us into full-time spectators, making us almost unable to imagine ourselves actors of our collective reality. Admittedly, through social networks, smartphones have enabled more people to become “content creators” but the vast majority of us only receive and comment on this content. We have been accustomed to passivity, or worse, to the illusion of activity. This can be a problem when considering what gives real self-confidence, and incidentally changes the world: doing “real” things, accomplishing oneself through action, and rarely through an action that takes two seconds between coffee and the shower…
