If you are one of the neck-bent addicts then it’s
likely and highly ironic that you will not have noticed how depressing it is to
walk down a street and see only the tops of people’s heads, even those walking
along with ‘loved’ ones.
But the addiction is strong, subtle and permanently
devouring. Those of us struggling to understand how millions have been fooled
by Trump and Brexit may consider, among other things, that nations permanently
distracted are permanently gullible.
However, users still fall into two categories. Those
who – on the whole – had some experience of life and brain development before
the smartphone became ubiquitous and a new generation plugged in not long
after the umbilical cord is severed.
With no smart phone or car I’m regularly on public
transport. When the grey people are getting from one homeless pitch to another
it can be depressing – and also difficult to breath. Equally saddening can be
when young people (in the latter category mentioned above) attempt
conversation. This seems to amount to telling the person next to them what they
just saw online (a Kardashian got new nail-polish/ someone said or did
something that a consensus agree is hilarious/the planet is dying - mwaaah)
before they are sucked back in and away from real human contact.
Smartphones are gateways to pressure of all depths and colours, information both good and bad plus the rest. They are also highly addictive incapacitators. While I have little
sympathy for older press barons braying for control of social media for simply
doing more effectively what they tried to do for decades, I do see that the
scale and reach is out of control.
Imagine if – when cars were invented – society said
– oh dear – new technology – we’d better ask car manufacturers to regulate it?
But, meanwhile – persons of any age can use the highways untutored and un-regarded.
There are many and varied issues here. The constant
testosterone throb of consumerism, easier access to vaster and darker
worlds and access to those who, by choice, inhabit those hinterlands, all served up unfiltered to
the vulnerable. There is the elevation of the trivial, the worship of the
mediocre and attention craving for attention’s sake that has become a 21st
century sickness. The decrease in real human interaction that many see as responsible for loss of the empathy that has taken eons for humans to acquire and which makes
civilisation possible, is one of social media and the smartphones’ biggest casualties (see More less-contact is making us horrible. )
However, as adults – especially those of us who had
a pre-social media life (or the decreasing percentage of us who still have no social
media) we have a gauge, a measure. Many of us can hold on to notions of what is real and what is nonsense.
In the light of horrors such as apparently social media driven teen suicides and the growth of deadly white supremacist terrorism, the government is posturing, again, about
legislating to control social media. Well, if they ever start dealing with, for example, the
unchallenged epidemic of fraud that goes almost entirely unprosecuted in the UK, we may believe they want to do more than make macho statements.
Unfortunately,
the answer is so evident, undramatic, none-consumer and non-hysteria driven it is not
something politicians would ever conceive of or propose. Like alcohol, drugs,
driving, marriage and smoking - smartphones should be illegal to those under
16.
If there are significant numbers of independent sentient beings left in the
general populous in 20-years-time, they will be as aghast at our idiocy in
letting under-16s have unfettered and constant smartphone access to the want-driven
highways of the internet as we were about slavery and sending children down
mines…
