Addiction or Obsession?

I could walk down the street, any street for that matter, in any village, town or city, in any country and on any continent, and all I would see are people “clutching” their mobile telephones. What is wrong with this picture?
As a youngster, at the lead end of the baby boomer explosion, I was raised in a home that had one rotary dial telephone set that sat on a second-floor hallway table. There was a phone number that started with two letters and followed by five digits. Today the phone numbers have at least 10 digits.. and………… no letters.
Ask a youngster to describe a rotary dial phone and you will get a blank look. A similar blank look when my wife made a small purchase at a neighbourhood convenience store the other day and when she asked the cashier for change in “quarters” said cashier looked at her blankly and said.. “what’s a quarter”? I am quite serious.
My parents, three siblings and myself , well actually two siblings as my youngest sister was only about six years old and did not receive or make many phone calls, shared this one phone, but as you can imagine, my two older sisters were the more frequent users.
In the mid to late 1950’s , wall-mounted phones were introduced and shortly thereafter, Princess phones.. stylish, and any colour you wanted so long as it wasn’t the basic Bell black? Much like early model T Ford cars, the only colour that was common to both telephones and those cars was.. black.
You may recall that the earliest mobile phones, I think introduced by Motorola were large, bulky, heavy and performed only two functions.. permitting the holder to place a call, or receive a call. It wasn’t long before some engineering types developed what we now call today, the smart phone. Considerably smaller in size, and subject to increasingly- frequent upgrades, these phones introduced an entire new way to communicate with others; store and/or send information; store and/or receive information and, in general, turn the residential landline phone into an almost-obsolete method of communication. True, businesses still used them, but more as an intercom service than anything else.
Today’s mobile, smart phones are essentially computers, with far greater storage and processing power than the room-sized behemoths that IBM and others produced in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. One can call, receive, conference call, text, take photos, search entire encyclopedias, arrange appointments, listen to music, read books, listen to podcasts, shop, sell and/or trade stocks and merchandise and perform all kinds of research…just to touch on only a few of the options available to us.
What owning mobile phones has done, and there are billions of phone owners and billions of mobile phones out there, is to create an entire new lifestyle and method of communication for people. To the extent that individuals appear to feel threatened and uneasy if they are not constantly holding a phone or at least have nearby access to same. Even engaging in face to face verbal conversation seems to becoming a lost art.. people prefer the more impersonal method of communication where one is not necessarily obliged to respond or answer immediately, or ever for that matter. I challenge each and every one of you reading this to become aware of your surroundings.. whether it be a waiting room; on public transit; in a university or even high school classroom or lecture hall or simply walking on the street, perhaps 90% of the people you see are clutching or holding a cell-phone or at least have one stuck in their back pocket.
Furthermore, it strikes me that almost everyone I know, or don’t know for that matter, seem consumed with using their phones. What is the constant urgency to be in contact; to look at photos; to share looking at photos; to following everyone’s exploits on social media and, in some cases, having several calls each day to the same family members?
When I entitled this particular Chronicle, the word “addiction” came to mind, where there is a physiological cause that manifests itself, whether the addiction involves tobacco, alcohol, narcotics, even some types of foodstuffs! Addicts can be treated, but not always successfully. Obsession on the other hand would strike me as more of a mental or psychological obstacle where an individual simply is unable to reconcile the difference between desire or need. This might be a bit of a stretch from someone who has never even taken psych 101. My apologies to those who have.
In the pre-industrial revolutionary time period, handwritten letters were sent and often took weeks, maybe even months to reach their final destination and of course the same length of time for replies. The advent of more scheduled post delivery such as the Pony Express and then telegrams reduced the time it took for contact.. from days to ultimately hours and with exponential, technology advances, communications are instant. How did we manage for Millenia without instant communications and have we been psychologically impacted when instant communication and/or constant contact enablement has been taken away from us, even if only temporarily.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of cell-phone addiction is to watch four people dining out at a restaurant and all four individuals are communicating on their cellphones but presumably not with each other!
Will we, as humans, ultimately lose totally the capacity and ability to verbally express ourselves? Maybe, or maybe not. Universities in an attempt to forestall AI generated submissions of essays and papers at all levels by students are now using anti-AI software to identify and reject such submissions and are seriously entertaining the idea of forcing students to present their information or defend their theses in an oral fashion to ensure a degree of originality.
I am wandering a bit afield here, so back to the phones for a moment.
Imagine if you will, your grandparents or great grandparents and how they might react if thrust into today’s world of hi-speed electronic communication. How would you, better yet, how could you explain that the entire contents of the Encyclopedia Britanica could be condensed into the memory of today’s smart phones. Well maybe it can’t, I am not totally current with the memory capacity. How would you then go on to explain to them that you can conduct all of your banking transactions; file your income tax, apply for a Drivers Licence, buy groceries, plan trips,,,, and on and on it goes.
My biggest concern, people, is what the next 25 years will bring and will any of us, of a prescribed demographic, be able to understand the new technology any better than our great grandparents could understand that of today. Since the rate of development has increased exponentially, maybe 25 years is not at all realistic… perhaps ten years will suffice!
I leave it with you.. for all of the benefits that “smart phones” afford us, have we, as the animal world’s leading and most intelligent species, started heading down a path which will ultimately lead to our irrelevance? AI has already shown that robots will very shortly replace humans in performing simpler, lower end tasks, and in a world that changes in nanoseconds.. our days of relevance may be numbered.
Back to smart phones for a moment…. Any chance that we can simply set them aside, even for a designated time period such that we can enjoy our confreres, and nature, and life without the desire, or in many cases, desperate need to remain.. electronically in touch? Just asking.