4 October

Do we really understand smartphone ‘addiction’? A common criticism is that smartphones are making people anti-social, because they’re constantly glued to them everywhere they go. I think that’s backwards. Smartphones allow people to be HYPER-social, because they allow them to be constantly connected to their friends and societies. It does mean that they’re often not as present to their immediate surroundings as they could be, although I’d wager before smartphones people would often daydream and otherwise zone-out in everyday life anyway. Our usual response to new technologies is knee-jerk moralism, based on what is more comfortable to us (usually from the past). When you see a teenager for example staring at their phone, from the outside it looks like they’re in a world of their own, but they’re usually not, they’re plugged into the much wider world. Sure sometimes people get the balance wrong, but as above, I think they always have, and think about it - for years people have pleaded with people to ‘act locally, think globally’. With a smartphone that’s *exactly* what people are often doing. They’re connecting their local lives to global activity, in real-time.