Five
myths about smartphones
No, they’re not
giving us cancer or making us more productive.
Americans are estimated to check their smartphones a
collective 8 billion times
per day, and Nielsen says we spend an average of one hour and 39 minutes on
our smartphones each day — up 60 percent from last year. But while many of us
consider our smartphones to be an essential part of our lives, there are many
misconceptions about how we use them and how they affect us.
MYTH NO. 1
Smartphones
give people cancer.
The World Health Organization (WHO) set off a
small flurry of panic in 2011 when it classified the radiation from cellphones
as “possibly carcinogenic.” And worrywarts for years have been concerned about the
“radiation” from handheld devices. Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle site, Goop,
asks, “Are Cell Phones and WiFi Signals Toxic?” The city of Berkeley, Calif., passed a “Right to Know”
measure in 2015 that requires all
cellphone stores to warn buyers that the devices emit radiation. “Even if the
science isn’t firm, if there’s a risk, we should proceed with caution,”
Berkeley City Council member Max Anderson told the New York Times at the time.
But scientists have never established a
direct link between cellphones and cancer, as even the WHO admitted. The
group’s fact sheet, issued
at the same time as its classification, says, “To date, no adverse health
effects have been established as being caused by mobile phone use.” Researchers
have yet to definitively rule out suggestions that phones can increase cases of
two types of brain cancer, a malignant form called glioma and a benign form
called acoustic neuroma, but a definitive causal link has never been found. And
the National Cancer Institute says there has been no significant increase in brain cancers in the past decade as cellphone
use has increased.
MYTH NO. 2
Smartphones
are a luxury that poor people don’t need.
The perception that smartphones are beyond
the reach of the poor surfaces in political debates about
government-subsidized phones. Critics of the Lifeline program — incorrectly
nicknamed the “Obama phone” program — that provides subsidies for cellphone
service have been particularly shocked that it can be used to reimburse
smartphone use. “The federal government should only be providing services for
emergencies. You and I, taxpayers, shouldn’t be paying for cellphones so
someone can have a social life,” then-Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark.) told the
Daily Caller in 2012. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate.” More recently,
critics of aid to Syrian refugees have pointed to photos of
them holding their smartphones, asking how dire their situation could be if
they still had a means to snap selfies.
But the dropping price of smartphones has put these devices in reach of
many more people. Companies such as Motorola and Chinese manufacturers Huawei
and OnePlus have focused on selling affordable phones, particularly in the
international market. The Pew Research Center reported that, as of last year,
54 percent of people across 21 emerging and developing countries “reported
using the internet at least occasionally or owning a smartphone.” In Malaysia,
for instance, where the median monthly income is about $1,130 , Pew found that
65 percent of people had a smartphone.
Smartphones have become a daily necessity,
not just a perk for the middle class. For many low-income families, as the
Commerce Department found, the
devices provide the only reliable access to the Internet — which they need to
apply for jobs or do homework, among other things. This spring, the department
reported that “29 percent of online households with family incomes below
$25,000 only used mobile Internet service at home, compared with 15 percent of
those households with incomes of $100,000 or more.”
What’s more, in crisis situations,
smartphones have become the most reliable way to get information, apply for aid
and find a place to live. Time magazine, which called smartphones a “lifeline”
for refugees, asked a man from Syria which was more important, food or power?
He answered without
hesitation: “Charging my phone.”
MYTH NO. 3
Smartphones
make you more productive.
How does your smartphone make you feel?
“Productive” was the most common answer (followed by “happy”) among respondents
asked to link their phones to an emotion in Pew’s 2015 study on
smartphone use. Productivity is a big selling point for smartphone makers.
Samsung’s ad campaign for its latest smartphone trumpets the virtue of being “busy, busy, busy ” and explains how the device can help buyers stay that
way.
But tapping away at your smartphone all day
doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting things done. A study released
in August, commissioned by the security firm Kaspersky Lab, found quite the
opposite. Researchers from the Universities of Würzburg and Nottingham-Trent
asked 95 participants to perform tasks with their phones placed in their pockets,
on their desks, in a locked drawer or outside the room. As the phones got
farther away, productivity levels went steadily up. Overall, those whose
smartphones were outside the room performed 26 percent better on the tests than
other participants did.
MYTH NO. 4
Smartphones
make us dumb and antisocial.
It seems intuitive, especially considering
the glazed, vacant-eyed stares on most people’s faces when they use their
phones. And think of all those selfie-related fatalities.
Researchers at Microsoft grabbed headlines when they found that the average
human attention span had dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds in
2015 — less than that of a goldfish — and that digital media use helped
contribute to that decline. The coverage practically writes itself: “Are
smartphones making us dumber?” asked one from the Huffington Post. “Butterfly brain: why
smartphones are making us stupid,” read another from the Telegraph.
But there’s nothing inherent in smartphones
that turns us into dunces. When it comes to actual intelligence, some studies
suggest that they in fact make us smarter. Researchers studying the “Flynn
effect” — a trend that suggests IQ overall has been improving over the years —
in people older than 50 say mobile phones and computers seem to contribute “considerably ” to people’s ability to stay in intellectually demanding
jobs for longer periods of time. “On average, test scores of people aged 50+
today correspond to test scores from people 4-8 years younger and tested 6
years earlier,” researcher Valeria Bordone told Science Daily.
There are certainly cases in which digital
media can prompt isolating behaviors; more and more researchers treat excessive
smartphone and Internet use as an
addiction. But that doesn’t necessarily make users
antisocial. In fact, smartphones enable us to speak more with close friends and
relatives than ever before, as well as to meet new people and organize social
events.
A 2015 Pew study showed
that coordinating plans and talking to family and friends were the second and
third most common uses for smartphones, behind finding information.
MYTH NO. 5
Smartphones
are killing retail stores.
For many pundits, it’s a foregone conclusion:
Online sales will supplant brick-and-mortar shops. “Retail guys are going to go
out of business, and ecommerce will become the place everyone buys,” tech
investor Marc Andreessen said in 2013. “You are not going to have a choice.”
When Amazon announced that it was making a smartphone with special shopping
features in 2014, Salon said it was chief executive Jeff Bezos’s path to
“kill off brick-and-mortar retail, once and for all.” (Bezos also owns The
Washington Post.)
There is no denying that smartphones have
altered the way we shop and that online shopping provides competition for the
traditional storefront. But about 90 percent of
purchases are still made in stores. Often, stores and smartphones have developed
a symbiotic relationship, as retailers experiment with ways to incorporate mobile
shopping into in-person shopping. One example is the rise of in-store pickup
programs, which give customers the convenience of mobile shopping and the
immediacy of real-world shopping — all without the shipping times. Meanwhile,
Amazon’s smartphone, which was designed so that shoppers could bypass stores
altogether, was discontinued after about a year.
Mobile shopping is on the rise — up 30 percent between
the holiday seasons of 2014 and 2015, according to IBM — but brick-and-mortar
stores are also popular with young people. An August report from eMarketer
found that teens prefer shopping
in a real store for just about everything apart from games. Perhaps shopping in
a store will become the next hipster trend.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-smartphones/2016/09/08/9b7ffd0a-75d9-11e6-be4f-3f42f2e5a49e_story.html?utm_term=.ed5c5171052e&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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