Smartphone Addiction Is a Plague

M.I.T. Professor Sherry Turkle has been kvetching about technology and its (mostly) negative impact on people and society for 30 years or more. Her latest tome, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, gets the closest to the truth so far.

In it, she laments how the smartphone in particular has created an atmosphere of shallowness and weakens the human capacity for empathy. She bases all of her conclusions on research, but does not completely explain the "how" of the mechanism. For that we need Marshall McLuhan, and he's dead.

It doesn't matter. The circumstantial evidence is strong and quite noticeable. I've watched this evolve and often comment on the addictive nature of the reward system of a mobile phone. The addiction mechanism was first observed in the late 1990s with the appearance of the BlackBerry, which soon earned the "Crackberry" nickname.

What is most noticeable and disconcerting is the emergence of new norms of politeness and civility. Anyone on the scene around 1998, for example, would tell you that it's rude to use a cell phone in a restaurant or chat loudly in public. That's no longer the case.

When I was a kid, there were things called pay phones, many only available within a large box called a phone booth where you could have a private conversation. Now it seems people want their conversations to be heard by strangers. What pathetic sociology created this odd desire?

Many of the conversations I overhear seem to be because some blowhard wants bystanders to know he is some sort of boss, supervisor, or wheeler dealer. Others apparently have more mystifying reasons to subject the public to squeals of "Omigod, really? Omigod, no way!"

In restaurants, mobile phones are usually on the table. You know, just in case some very important message crops up. As if these people are surgeons on call.

In theaters, even during a live presentation, at least one phone will go off during the performance no matter how many times people are told to turn off the ringer. Right in the middle of a dramatic moment, a ring tone ruins the moment. What is even weirder is when the person actually takes the call.

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Sometime, especially during the holiday shopping season when people are on the streets in droves, look at the sheer number of people staring at their phones while roaming around. It's frightening.

You get the sense that if the cellular system was blown out, people would be just completely lost and wander around like zombies bumping into each other and asking strangers, "Do you know me? Do you know where I live?"

None of this is good and Turkle knows it. Her book would be a good gift for Christmas. It's just a shame nobody has quite figured out what is so damned compelling about these devices that people allow them to run their lives at every level. Why does the world orbit around these devices? I'd be interested in the definitive answer to that question.