How smartphones came to rule us all
And how to take the power back
When my mom got her first iPhone a few years ago, she was impressed, to say the least, and nicknamed it My Precious. We thought it was just a phase, until she changed her default email signature to Sent from My Precious. And let’s be honest, if Gollum saw today’s smartphones, he would gladly trade in that rusty old ring for any one of them (except maybe the Galaxy Note 7).
Our phones are like a pocket portal to endless power. Infinite knowledge. Instant entertainment. Approval. Love. But as hobbits and men alike know, power often comes at a price.
We smirk at satirical images like this. We think our new addiction is funny. But the joke’s on us.
The harmful effects are just beginning to materialize. Our sleep is disturbed as the light from screens messes with our natural circadian rhythms. Our bodies are damaged by iHunching and Text Claw. We know all this and have no real power, nor desire, to stop it.
But robbing us of sound sleep and good posture is a relatively minor offense when you consider what our handheld bedmates are really stealing: our awareness of the present moment, the ability to live in and appreciate the now, those minutes of just being essential to feeling happy and alive.
We reach for our phones over 150 times a day, and if you count every tap, swipe, like and click, that number is over 2,000. Add in the few seconds it takes to reach for that phone and put it away each time, compounded by the ceaseless hunt for a charger, and that’s an ungodly amount of time spent with our smart pocket pal, an immeasurable chunk of our attention diverted away from the world around us.
These devices haven’t been around long enough to understand their true impact. The iPhone isn’t even ten years old yet. But the dystopian futures already write themselves. Shows like Black Mirror double as cautionary tale and guilty pleasure. Images of Pikachu saddled on our broken necks get shares and laughs, when they should perhaps get tears and behavioral change.
I made a small change three weeks ago: deleting Facebook from my phone. I only check it once or twice a day on my laptop instead of 10 to 20 times on my phone. On my weaker days I unconsciously shift more time to Instagram. But on my stronger days I actually read and write more. You can guess which days are more satisfying.
During leisure travels I find myself tethered to my phone to compensate for a pitiful sense of direction. I get lost less, but I also miss more of what’s around me. I remember astoundingly more from the trips where wifi was nonexistent. The Inca Trail in Peru had none; every amazing, painful step is seared into my memory. Easter Island and the Galapagos both had none; I can vividly recall actual conversations I had with humans and giant tortoises.
But most places in Europe are now properly wired, and those trips are more of a blur. I can’t resist the urge to use my phone, whether to look up a restaurant reco on TripAdvisor or post a likeable travel photo and check back periodically to confirm that it is, in fact, likeable.
I know better than this, but I can’t help it. Most of us can’t resist a fast-acting antidote for the slightest hint of boredom, loneliness, or social awkwardness. Plus our favorite apps are intentionally designed to maximize their addictive qualities — their stickiness — by exploiting our hardwired brain psychology. So it’s no surprise that your brain on Facebook looks alarmingly similar to your brain on drugs.
Why aren’t we taking this more seriously?
We don’t think something as shiny and useful as a smartphone could truly hurt us. We don’t fully realize that we are its slave and not the other way around. But I suspect that fifty years from now, mankind will look back on this era as the Digital Zombie Apocalypse. That awkward transition phase in society where phones were the cool, desirable thing to do, without enough definitive evidence yet that they were turning us into The Walking, Texting Dead.
Part of the problem is that phones are a highly imperfect, interim technology. They’re not meant to rule our lives forever. Eventually we’ll have tiny, wearable, personal AI assistants that make smartphones sound like idiots (like in the movie Her). Screens will appear as needed, in whatever size and format we prefer (like VR headsets for the most immersive experience imaginable). Or something else entirely will be dreamed up by someone who hasn’t been born yet.
In the meantime we’re stuck with the constant barrage of texts, Snapchats, personal and work emails, social feeds and breaking news updates that are usually click bait headlines of little real urgency. All on a tiny screen that is far from the ideal form factor to consume information and communicate with others.
The more obvious part of the problem today is that phones are clearly indispensable and keep society functioning. We can’t — and don’t want to — change this anytime soon. Weight problems are particularly hard to overcome because you can’t remove food triggers from your life the way you can with drugs and alcohol. We have to eat, and we have to use our phones. Who is to say how much or how little is right, and what for?
So how do we solve this?
Step 1: Recognize that we might have a full-blown ‘Houston, we have a problem’ problem, rather than a cute, mostly harmless infatuation with an inanimate object. That it shouldn’t be normal or healthy to touch our phones hundreds of times a day. To check them in the middle of the night and with half-open eyes in the morning. To feel phantom vibrations that make us think we got a text when nothing came in. To raise new generations who will think it’s natural that a little slab of glass and steel is nearly as important to us as other people, if not more important than certain people.
Step 2: Try to impose some reasonable limits on usage and social etiquette. A digital detox day once a week or certain hours daily when the phone is off, like two hours before bed or directly after waking. If you’re catching up with a human face to face, the phone does not exist except for a quick, discrete glance to ensure you haven’t missed a true emergency phone call or news of a celebrity divorce. (Don’t get me started on the latter.)
Step 3A: Realize that Steps 1 and 2 will ultimately fail us. We are only human after all. Hell, I’m drafting this article ON my phone right now from bed at 2:15am because I’m too tired and lazy to get my laptop three feet away even though it would be infinitely faster to type on a real keyboard. So yeah, it’s time to bring in the big guns.
Step 3B: Rename smartphones to something less appealing. It’s time we dropped the phones part anyway since that’s the last thing we willingly use them for — it’s like RadioShack still holding on to radio. And smart deludes us into feeling clever by association for being its conjoined twin 24/7. Perhaps a term that paints a more accurate picture of its role in our lives will weaken our dependency.
Possible Contenders:
- Digital Leash
- Handheld Handcuffs
- Mindless Rectangle
- TimeThief
- Mobile Mordor (one LOTR reference too many?)
Jokes aside, I may not have all the answers, but let’s at least start by asking more questions.
If I sound like an old curmudgeon who hates technology, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. I’ve spent the last decade of my career studying how tech is shaping consumer needs and behavior. For the last five years I’ve had two phones and two laptops, thanks to a dismal attempt to keep some semblance of separation between my personal and professional life.
Ironically enough, I also helped launch the first iPhone back in 2007. I managed search marketing for Apple through their digital ad agency in San Francisco, with the glamorous job of placing paid search ads on Google, Yahoo! and even MSN back in the dinosaur days of the internet.
I was the first person I knew to get the iPhone. Everyone who held it knew instantly that this was the beginning of a beautiful, dangerous friendship.
I’ve been an “early adopter” of technology my whole life, and now I’d like to be among the early rejecters of insanity.
People have been observing the darker side of progress for decades, and now might be the perfect time to start taking them seriously. Alan Watts’ timeless texts. Sherri Turkle’s books on relationships. Andrew Sullivan’s recent article about the fascinating cultural context surrounding our connected lives.
Writer Joseph Campbell once said, “I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
I fear we are missing that experience entirely in exchange for staring into little screens that dangle the elusive promise of human connection, entertainment and the world at your fingertips. Because while we’re busy fumbling with the world at our fingertips, we’re missing the world beyond them.
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