Mobile phones, especially smart phones, are, among the great technological breakthroughs, rivaling the invention of the telegraph and the original phone.
But they are not all blessing. I am persuaded that they are rewiring our brains, making us more connected but less social, shortening our already shortened attention spans, enfeebling our imaginations, and eroding our social graces. These same devices that have so much utility can be as addictive as alcohol, tobacco or drugs. We just can’t seem to keep our hands off of them.
THIS IS NOT A SUDDEN revelation, but a realization that has grown through observation and experience.
We no longer can bear to be alone, even briefly. Isolation is not something to be relished but rather something to avoid.
Plain old cell phones made it possible to reach out and touch someone far more readily than AT&T could have imagined when it adopted that slogan in 1979. It is if there was some pent up demand to talk, and now that we could banish aloneness except in those uncivilized regions where cell phone towers do not rise above the landscape.
Nowadays, if I walk down the aisle of the grocery store and hear people talking to themselves, or meet someone walking alone down the sidewalk talking and gesturing, I no longer assume they’re lunatics. If the car in front of me sits long after the light has changed, I assume the driver’s mind is on his telephone conversation.
Sometimes, when I am standing on a street corner waiting to cross, I count the number of drivers talking on their phones as they pass. It is nearly always a majority. I have never been much of one to spend time on the telephone, and I wonder what all those people are talking about.
But there is something worse than being alone. It is being bored, even for a microsecond.
Smart phones came along, and to borrow a Steve Jobs word, they are insanely useful — and addictive. Everyone could amuse themselves around the clock.
I AM NOT SOME LUDDITE wanting to smash the new looms. I have a smart phone, and with it I can check my and my wife’s calendars when I’m making an appointment, keep a shopping list, find the time and direction of the sunrise on Aug. 16, take a photo of my granddaughter, and look up the rules for a game. I can check my e-mail and the latest sports scores. There’s no end of apps that can do marvelous things. One person reviewed a 1991 Radio Shack ad and found that he would have had to spend $3,054.82 for the gadgets that are incorporated into his smart phone.
Now to the downside: they suck us in and make us mindless. Many of us have laughed at the video of a woman walking right into a shopping center’s fountain while she was busily texting. We’ve seen people at restaurant tables playing with their telephones instead of paying attention to the person across the table from them. We’ve been put off by the bright light of a telephone screen in a darkened theater.
And most of us, I suspect, have felt the frustration of trying to have a conversation with someone while they were paying more attention to their phone than they were to us.
One person I know sits down to play one little game on her telephone and loses all sense of time.
It has been my experience that boredom often leads to creativity. When your mind is not occupied with some stimulus, it is free to wander in new directions and make new connections between old realities. I doubt that any significant idea has come to anyone’s mind in the middle of playing a game on their smart phone. I wonder if those who have become as habituated to constant stimulus as a crackhead has to his crystal will know what to do with themselves if the stimulus goes away.
I HAVE SKIRTED close to that addiction myself. I am trying to refrain from checking for e-mail more than a couple of times a day, and I am telling myself that I do not have to check the news headlines a dozen times a day. I’m even deliberately leaving my phone in the car at times.
As any recovering addict will tell you, it’s not easy.
But I am holding up as a goal an observation from Cicero: I do not consider any man to be truly free who does not sometimes do nothing.
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