My New Year's resolution: give up the iPhone

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This was published 4 years ago

Opinion

My New Year's resolution: give up the iPhone

By Madeline Grant

Wandering around any city centre these days is to step into a zombie movie; hollow men and women shuffling along, heads bowed, occasionally knocking into lamp posts or passing dogs. The clue is in their hands.

The real danger isn't incoming traffic, but the deadening effect on our brains.

The real danger isn't incoming traffic, but the deadening effect on our brains.Credit: Bloomberg

Around the world, entire cities are being redesigned to protect smartphone users from traffic: flashing lights installed at the edge of German pavements and even, in Beijing, separate pedestrian lanes. To reduce the number of deaths caused by “twalking” (texting while walking), a team at Columbia University has created headphones that warn the listener of imminent collisions. But the real danger isn’t incoming traffic, it’s the deadening effect on our brains. These “labour-saving devices”, designed to act as our servants, have instead become our masters.

I had big ambitions for the Christmas break. I meant to re-read Middlemarch and the latest Julian Barnes. Eventually, appalled by my inability to complete even simple tasks without breaking off every few minutes to glance at my phone, I took action. In the spirit of Odysseus and the Sirens, I entrusted my device to my mother and forbade her to return it. But soon, the irresistible trilling of beeps and pings from her handbag caused me to fabricate a non-existent work excuse so she’d give it back. Unlike Odysseus’s crew, she fell for it.

Smartphones provide information at the drop of a hat, pooling human knowledge in once unimaginable ways. But they are also – paradoxically – making us dimmer, with shorter attention spans, reduced memory banks and far less patience. Despite the opportunities to read any classic novel for free or learn a new language, I suspect the biggest winners in this knowledge revolution have been YouTube stars and pets that resemble dictators.

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Committing poetry to memory is one of life's great pleasures – the phrase “learning by heart” reveals its treasured status. Yet when trying for the millionth time to learn some T. S. Eliot, I realised that almost all the poems and Shakespeare verses I can recite predate my smartphone days. At least we whose childhoods were tablet-free have a few of these references to fall back on, unlike the next generation of glassy-eyed children.

The ascendancy of the iPhone has left us terminally unable to enjoy the moment. Last year, the society photographer Dafydd Jones, famous for his shots of a young Nigella Lawson playing croquet in a sedan chair as an Oxford undergraduate, mounted a new exhibition of glossy partygoers glued to their phones. Ex Scouts and proud Duke of Edinburgh winners, who’ve crossed rough and unfamiliar terrain with ease, also find themselves as adults unable to navigate more than a few hundred yards of well-known cities without the assistance of Google Maps. The Arthur Ransome generation would be appalled.

Having lost myself once too often after my phone died, my New Year’s resolution is to spend less time in front of a screen. To end the miserable accumulation of unfinished books and abandoned thank you letters. Starting tomorrow.

The Telegraph, London

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