Put Your Cellphone Down
Bans on cell phones in schools have become popular across the country and abroad. Adults should follow the school’s lead. Despite the cell phone’s profound impact on society, our mobile devices are damaging the public sphere and disconnecting us from each other.
Without question, phones have given individuals more power to connect, compute, share, and consume than most could have imagined mere decades ago. Families and friends can communicate instantaneously around the world just as real and fake news can spread immediately. I fondly remember the limited features on my first cell phone, calling my father from the Stanford-Notre Dame football while I was in college so he could hear the crowds. But for all the benefits of constant connectivity, the negatives must be kept in check.
The constant connectivity of modern phones, now paired with noise-cancelling headphones, cut individuals off from their physical environment and others and this is harming us.
Two recent experiences within the past month are particularly troubling. First, public transit is littered with phone addiction. I saw this too many times on public transit systems along the east coast. In Boston, students pack themselves into the Green Line streetcars without talking or making eye contact with one another. In New York, morning commuters are so distracted and immersed in their phones they can’t be bothered to move into subway cars or help out others who may need a hand, making it difficult to move around on the subways. Forget people making eye contact, making small talk, or having a newspaper or book out to trigger any interaction; the train cars are silent, except for someone occasionally blasting music without headsets.
On a recent subway ride taking my son to school, we were shocked to strike up a conversation with another non-phone-using Dad. Just a brief, two-stop conversation left me feeling more energized and connected and my son was perplexed that we had a “talk with another Dad” as it was a true rarity.
The second interaction was in bulk shopping stores where sampling of foods are well known. On my recent trips to these stores, I’ve found that most of those in the store are on or plugged into their phones missing the famous samples. These stores have seemingly lost all signs of life; there is no friendly chatter or customer service. When it came time to check out, the line was close to 40 deep despite numerous registers being open. The shoppers were so distracted and unware of their environment that they waited in line for significant amounts of time while cashiers waited by empty check out belts.
Phones are damaging our ability to connect with those around us. This behavior needs to stop and people need to pay attention to the unmediated world in which they are embedded. It is no surprise that Gallup finds that almost half of Americans say people have gotten ruder since the COVID-19 pandemic; nearly half of US adults (47 percent) say people are behaving more rudely in public these days than before the COVID-19 pandemic and 80 percent comment that they regularly see rude behavior when they go out in public. Are people being deliberately rude or simply disconnected from everything around them?
It doesn’t matter how well we build and design spaces for social interaction if no one can interact because they are digitally distracted. As William H. Whyte, who studied New York City’s public spaces famously said in The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces over 40 years ago, “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people.” What good is a great public space or a café if patrons and visitors are physically in the space but focused on screens, listening to music, and connecting virtually rather than with those in real space? Whyte’s well-established finding is irrelevant if we are unaware of the other people around us and want to be focused on our phones and not others.
We are lonely and isolated even in the presence of others because we are not authentically connecting in person, intermediated connections are not equivalent. Our ability to process information and think critically is changing by rampant phone use. It is well established in psychology that small talk, random interactions, and weak ties do open us up as humans for deeper connection with others; small talk is often “a gateway to more meaningful connections.”
The solution to fixing many of these problems is really simple: Put your phone away. It is there for emergencies, looking up information or directions, or snapping and sharing photos when needed. But it doesn’t need to be out and on all the time. We seem to understand these ideas now when it comes to children and their learning, focus, and friendships—we must learn them for ourselves, too.
Originally online at AEI Ideas: https://www.aei.org/society-and-culture/put-your-cellphone-down/