Let’s keep a sense of perspective about smartphones, shall we?
A long weekend article in The Guardian, “Our minds can be hijacked: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia”, addresses concerns about the destruction of our attention span through the use of smartphones, a phenomena that some insist on describing as addiction, even though not a single association of psychologists or psychiatrists anywhere in the world has raised any such concerns, while some of the people responsible for their use are now telling us to desist using them for our own mental health.
There is no such thing as internet or smartphone addiction. We may be fed up avoiding bumping into people with their heads sunk over their screen at all times, even when driving, but the truth is that we use our smartphones so much because they are useful and we like them, period.
Smartphone use will increase. Let’s be rational: as a consequence of the development of phenomena such as “there’s an app for that” or the internet of things, we have gone from using a terminal to talk on the phone to using it for everything from switching our lights on to setting the alarm, opening the door, consulting a map, taking a photo or listening to music. Social activities not only entertain us, but regularly deliver dopamine each time someone follows us or gives us a like, and they lead us to change our habits in ways that some find irresistible, while others scratch their heads and consider them unhealthy.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t issues here. The transition to a model of hyper-abundance of information has distracted us, we are find it hard to read longer articles, we do not check things and share articles we have not read, based simply on an attention-grabbing headline. All this has caught us unprepared, and we have not been educated to deal with such an environment, with the result that we voted a moron into the White House. Relearning the art of concentrating in the modern age will not be easy, and requires learning, training and specific techniques. All new environments require adapting and learning new skills and applying them.
Our young people are not sick or addicted: they have simply grown up in an environment for which they were not fully prepared, and for which our education systems have not properly adapted. The solution is not to restrict the use of smartphones and tablets, but to use them more: turn them into something completely normal, for studying, working, discovering what we need, entertaining ourselves, and so many other things. And when needed, we have to be able to prioritize. For that, some training is needed. I have commented on it countless times: social and use protocols always come after the mass adoption phase, not before or during, and as part of a social consensus that is exercised through laws (no using our smartphones when driving, for example), customs, education, etc. We will learn to improve our attention span in an environment of hyperabundance not through restrictions, but by learning how to make the most of what smartphones have to offer.
So please, can we stop the spread of this collective hysteria and focus on learning to use a tool that will be part of the landscape for many generations to come? No matter how hard we try, smartphones are not going to disappear, their use will not be banned except in a very few, special situations.
Children, of course, will have to understand how these doses of dopamine affect their behavior and to keep their emotions in check, in the same way children learned that they could not play all the time in previous generations. If we do not educate them, if we do assume our responsibilities as parents, then sure, they will go from uploading a photo of themselves that gets fifty likes, to uploading something more revealing or stupid, or dangerous and get 500, and of course, that they will not want to stop, and they will accuse their parents of “not understanding anything.”
But that doesn’t make them addicts. We cannot use the excuse of addiction to blame all evils on smartphones: it is just that we have not taught our children properly. Tempting as it is to blame a supposed addiction or technology, let’s be serious and keep some perspective here.
There is no point in trying to restrict things that quite simply cannot be restricted. Instead, they should be seen as a normal part of our life, to be used when needed, and put them aside when they prevent us from doing other things. It’s that simple, and obviously, that complicated. We have no choice but to address this, to understand it, and to get involved.
(En español, aquí)
