Smartphone Addiction

Smartphones

A couple of coworkers of mine recently took a trip to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. They were off the grid for a couple of days and once they accomplished their amazing feat they reentered the civilized world and started posting their photos and observations on Facebook.

I commented that it was good to see them with internet access again and Patrice came back with “being off the grid is so very refreshing”. I thought about it for a minute or two and really couldn’t remember the last time I was completely out of touch.

The more I thought about it the harder it became for me to remember when.  To the best I can recollect it was sometime before 2003.

I’ve been carrying a messaging enabled smartphone since 2003.  My first was a Blackberry 6510 through Nextel. At the time I was a consultant working in New York City at an Investment Bank commuting a total of five hours a day to and from work.  Occasionally being able to skip out from work a few hours early and showing maybe thirty minutes late was invaluable to me so I shouldered the cost of the device on my own.

At that time I used to marvel at the convenience of being able to shoot off an email from the train or respond to one with a follow up phone call. It was a limited device but you could read your emails and respond to them. They had a primitive internet browser that wasn’t really good for anything with the 300DPI monochrome screen and no websites being optimized for a small screen.

I transitioned to a color blackberry 7230 when they became available and riding the train everyday I could see these devices becoming more prolific.  Pretty soon half of the train car was filled with people looking at their hand held devices tapping off emails, texting friends and family.

Apple released the iPhone in June of 2007 and the race was on. You could only buy an iPhone on AT&T and although I secretly coveted one, their network where I live has pretty spotty coverage so  I waited.  In March of 2011 I accidently dropped my Blackberry 8830 into the toilet.  As I undid my belt, it slid in its holster and dropped into the bowl. I retrieved it, did my business and drove to the Verizon store.

Taking a number for the service department I longingly gazed at the new Verizon iPhones. I had received an iPad for my birthday in September so I had an understanding on how to use one. My number was called and I walked up to the service desk. I told the service guy what happened, said the thing was shingot and could he please just expedite replacement process. The guy whispers back to me that they are contractors and they needed a minimum of an hour of troubleshooting time in order to get paid. I was in a hurry so I excused myself and walked over to the sales desk and asked a woman how long it would take to put me in an iPhone  Her reply of 15 minutes got me thinking. I told her to do it and went back to the service guy and got my waterlogged blackberry back.

It changed my world almost instantly. All of a sudden I had my phone, camera, music on one device with one charger for both my iPad and phone.

The iPhone 4 became a 5. Judy held fast keeping her Blackberry 8830 and I used to make fun of her.  Verizon would call and tell her they would give her any phone she wanted if she would trade in the 8830 which was a bandwidth hog on their network. Still she refused which went on until November 2013 when she dropped her phone into a toilet and switched to an iPhone 4s.

Up until that point Judy would take a few emails on her blackberry and talk on the phone but little more than that. She would always make fun of me for starting at my phone when we were eating dinner or out at a bar.

The iPhone completely changed Judy’s usage.  She downloaded the Facebook app and within weeks we were both starting at our phones instead of talking to each other while eating meals. I began to suspect there was something wrong when we went to a new tapas restaurant in Danbury at happy hour which was so loud and busy we started texting each other across the table.

Fast forward to 2015 and I’m working as an airline pilot. I’m on the road all but twelve days a month traversing through sometimes five or six airports a day. Observing people I notice everyone from nine to ninety are starting at their phones. Passengers, rampers, gate agents, restaurant servers, cops, pilots and flight attendants all looking at their phone.  I’ll joke around about it with my coworkers saying “hey  what did we look at before we had these phones” everyone smiles sheepishly and goes back to staring at their phone.

I start to think about my own use. Anytime I have nothing to do, feel uncomfortable or bored, I pull out the phone.  Hanging with people and have nothing more to say, pull out your phone.  Have an hour to kill?  The phone takes care of that.

I'm concerned about this because this summer my eldest brother received a Galaxy 5S phone. He's always has been a technophobe eschewing any technology that has reached the mainstream in the past twenty plus years. I watched with fascination when he was in Connecticut last, sitting at my kitchen table looking down at his phone. 

This made me think about the Star Trek episode "The Other Side of Paradise" where the crew of the Enterprise find a colony with plants that blow spores in your face taking over your mind. Kirk is the last one to get sprayed by the spores, but the love of his ship and command generate anger in him which counteracts the spores. These damn phones seem to be taking over all our minds, and I always thought my brother was like Kirk, the last holdout.  

The odd thing is there was a time in my life where I needed to in touch constantly. There were deals to be made and customers to respond to. But these days I am a very small cog in a giant gear. I’m not important and no one needs to get ahold of me immediately. So why do I feel the need to check my phone obsessively?  I really don’t know, but I think there is something subconscious going on.  Something about the smartphone likely releases Dopamine or some other chemical  that stimulates a pleasure center in our brains. 

Once we become accustomed to that pleasure center being activated, like an addict we continue to seek that again and again.

We may never find this out because there is an enormous amount of money being generated by the sale and use of these devices. But I’d like to suggest, if this was a cult, a drug, or a religion, the evening news would be filled with talking heads crying how the country was being taken over by these devices. I can see Wolf Blitzer Shepard Smith and Sixty Minutes dedicating segments to it.

But off the grid? Can’t remember when. But I doubt I will go to Africa anytime soon, so its unlikely. But maybe, just maybe when it comes time to renew my cell phone contract I will go back to a phone that only makes calls. We’ll see.