Smartphone Addiction in Our Life

Over the past few years, many of you have auricularly discerned me and other professionals describe how smartphone use, and the technologically immersive culture in general, is associated with a multitude of negative outcomes. Whether it be slumber woes, incremented apprehensiveness, cyberbullying, rampant pornography exposure or declining gregarious skills, it is pellucid that the outcomes look anything like the sultry, sophisticated commercials that tech companies relish to utilize. Yet albeit many of us have focused our attention on concerns about youth development, a recent article in the Wall Street Journal reminds us that threats cut across all ages, but commence with our minds. Ever since the first iPhone was relinquished in 2007, researchers have been visually examining how smartphones are affecting our perspicacity, which roughly verbalized involves our competency to fixate, retain/recall information and quandary-solve/reason.

Albeit advertisements purport that these remarkable technological innovations will only make us more keenly intellective and more efficient, the evidence betokens quite the antithesis. In the words of the WSJ author, “research suggests that as we grow more dependent on them, our perspicacity emasculates.”Albeit the article reviewed many findings, the major themes were as follows: The presence of smartphones, even when turned off or not answered, is associated with poorer attention, sloppier work, and incremented symptoms of solicitousness (e.g., blood pressure spikes, nervous noetic conceptions). The more proximate in proximity the contrivances are, the more “brainpower” is decremented. For example, individuals performed best when phones were out of the room and worst when phones were in front of them (and when in the pocket or out of visual perception, performance was in the middle).

One recent study denoted that when schools vetoed smartphones altogether, test scores incremented the most, especially for poorest students. Even in brief conversations (e.g., 10 minutes or less), the presence of smartphones inhibits the development of a sense of intimacy, trust, and empathy, especially when consequential topics are discussed. Smartphones and other contrivances inhibit encoding and recall of information. Dubbed the “Google effect,” the conception that information can be probed in the cyber world seems to insensately reduce the likelihood that people will recollect information given to them. People are largely incognizant of the way in which smartphones engender diversions that engender a “brain drain;” individuals often gainsay that contrivances are associated with poorer outcomes even when data reveals otherwise.

As with a number of other articles and studies published in many well-revered journals and publications across the world, we might expect that there would be a plausible replication to an inundating body of evidence that our tech utilization patterns must be altered or consequences will only become more dismal. Yet as we are learning, trends seem to be running contrary to what the advice beseeches us to consider. From an objective, rational sense, it is arduous to deduce how this would be the case if we genuinely value our health and salubrity, and that of our youth. But when it comes to smartphones, it appears that two major factors have impeded much progress in the short time they have surmounted. One, the immediate experience, accommodation and “perception of security” they provide appears to have trumped all other considerations, including that of whether they (and the cognate utilization patterns) are authentically “better” for our health and salubrity. Albeit authors such as me might perpetually point to solemn concerns about their utilization, the fact (as noted in the WSJ article) is that the average iPhone utilizer optically canvasses their contrivance over 30,000 times in a year. What this designates is that the contrivance in your hand or your pocket ends up seeming more consequential to your life than gradual vicissitudes in the way you celebrate, feel, move, act and relate to others. Put another way, the more we utilize and depend on our contrivances, the more that we simply feel we can’t do without them, even if it is it is draining our encephalon and our bodies.

The second factor is that with incremented dependence have come impuissant (albeit well-intentioned) recommendations and the noble, yet ill-apprised “free will” argument. In regard to the former, it is facile to forget that it was just a decade ago that most people didn’t have a smartphone at all; it was just a couple of decades ago that most people didn’t have any mobile contrivance (and you should optically discern the shock on students’ faces when I tell them this). For generations of today, it seems virtually implausible that life could have even survived afore the dawn of Apple. But it did, and by many standards, it did so quite well. Yet with the rapid, dramatic infusion of tech dependence have come recommendations that are well-intended but frankly impotent in substance, support, and authenticity-testing.

Adscititiously, I have yet to have a parent describe a substantial reason their youth needs a smartphone and is more salubrious, more jubilant and holier with one. I can some parents celebrate I am overblowing concerns and some parents who just like the accommodation of the contrivances for their youth, but not a single one has endeavored to convince me that a smartphone is better for their kids. And yet, 80-85 percent of middle schoolers have one and kids perpetuate to get them even younger. In regard to the “free will” argument, I have auricularly discerned multiple writers argue that we just have to “buck up” and make better decisions and not let the technology control us but instead us take charge of the technology.

Sounds great, and those that ken me would be the first to verbalize that I greatly value personal discipline, self-control, and taking control over our machines. But I have a question. How is the tech-self-control experiment working, especially for our youth? If we are veracious with ourselves, the answer is “horribly.” It is not just me and the research saying this. It is parents, edifiers, administrators, counselors, and many other people I have verbalized with that are strained at the seams in endeavoring to deal with quandaries that are directly linked to tech use. The reason quandaries subsist isn’t that many people don’t have good intent or don’t wish that their contrivances were assets, not drains. The reason is that we HUGELY underestimate the puissance of our insensate and are way too prideful in celebrating that we can have it all under control, and edify our kids to do equipollent.

Few of us believe our 14-year-olds are yare to drive. Why do we believe that they are yare to manage a contrivance that is like a superhighway for their minds? As most any person who has struggled with a substance or behavioral addiction will tell you, if you bring it in the house and ambulate around with it in your hand or in your pocket, it is only a matter of time until you will yield to its temptation. Tech companies spend upwards of billions of dollars to make their products addictive; the conception that adults (and youth especially, with encephalons yet plenarily composed) should be able to just “summon their free will” and make it all better without making substantial, systemic changes is identically tantamount argument that is failing the extravagant corpulence crisis right now.

In the cessation, though, we are being faced with questions about whether we are inclined to make more astronomically immense changes that sanction for authentic progress. It is a question of whether parents will forego their worries and inconvenience about withholding and restricting contrivances from their youth in favor of their values and science. It is a question of whether schools will take a solemn visually examine the research and make tech decisions predicated on evidence rather than accommodation, marketing, and fears that they won’t keep up and students will depart. It is a question of whether our society as a whole will operate our health or our desires. Ultimately, it is a question of what we all value most and what we don’t. The cull is looming, and the costs of our decisions (or non-decisions) will be great. I just hope that a revolution of sorts, an authentic harkening to the desiderata of health and humanity is on the way because my kids and I are getting tired of optically discerning erroneously hyped tech ads on TV without the fine print.