Phone Zombies?

I rarely carry a phone. I feel like a visitor from another planet watching my fellow hairless apes walk around like zombies, staring and poking at tiny screens.

Which is master and which is slave? Phone or user? Phones use us to make more phones, like a virus.

Quite a prolific virus. Over 17 billion smartphones sold worldwide since 2009. Almost two billion new ones each year. Like any tool, it has its place. Although the smartphone is rarely the best tool for any particular job.

My biggest concern: A total lack of meta-awareness by the user. The user is not aware how much time they are spending in a zombie-like scrolling trance. Do they even remember what they have seen?

They stand in doorways or otherwise block people, oblivious to what they are doing. Someone will walk toward me smiling and I smile back. They are not looking at me. They are on their phone. I don’t exist to them.

The lack of meta-awareness is most noticeable to me when I try to talk to a phone zombie. “Keep talking, I am listening.” No. You are not.

A 2009 Stanford study showed that there really is no such thing as multi-tasking. You do one thing and then switch to another. The more you do this, the worse you actually get at it.

People think that listening is an easy task, done with just a bit of the brain. Wrong. The cognitive load of listening is actually higher than the cognitive load of speaking. I notice that when the phone zombie wants to speak, they stop looking at the phone. If they have to stop looking at the phone to speak, doesn’t that mean they need to stop looking at the phone to listen?

Attention spans have gone almost to zero. If I send an email with more than one point, only one point will receive a reply.

One of the saddest sights for me is a group of people together, but each is looking at their phone rather than at each other. Comedian Bill Maher has noted that the problem is the ever presence of the phone. Going online on a computer does not have the same addictive quality as having the social media world constantly in reach. Constantly sending “news feed” notifications of things that rarely are important.

Does anyone believe this “news” has any resemblance to the real journalistic news we once received from professionals like Walter Cronkite?

Studies show that even having the phone in the same room while turned off is a distraction. The phone creates a separation anxiety akin to what a child feels when a parent is out of sight. Not only for the phone, but for all of the FOMO: The Fear of Missing Out on something in that feed of thousands of Friends who are barely acquaintances.

The phone creates a
separation anxiety akin to
what a child feels when a
parent is out of sight.

The phone and social media could be useful tools. Remember the Arab Spring when social media was used to organize meaningful change? Why is this so rare?

Has there ever been a complex manufactured product with such a short obsolescence cycle? I have only ever owned two cars in my 50 years of driving. But phones are discarded after an average of 18 months! As an engineer, I am in awe of the advanced technology in such a device. It is as if we were throwing out great works of art.

Such advanced technology used to be modular and repairable. Not smartphones.

Phones have become a technology brain drain. As a professional photographer, I was grateful that camera technology used to improve over time. But that has come to a dead stop. There has been no meaningful improvement on my 10-year-old camera. All of the improvements go to phone cameras that cannot do what I need as a professional.

I believe in appropriate technology. Phones have their place as a tool. Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Do we really want to walk around everywhere with a hammer in our hands?