Phone Slaves!
The problem
is not the phones or that we have become addicted to them, but our mindless
usage of the device
Teenagers
have turned into screenagers, friends have turned into machines and restaurants
have become Instagram ATMs
Do you own your phone or
does your phone ow ou This isn’t an effort to start a column with some
pseudo-intellectual BS, it’s a question that you eed to deeply reflect on
before you read any further. Ha e we let our phones take over our lives? Do we
think we a i the right thing when we are tapping away on our mobile ev es every
minute of every waking hour? We all ask these que s, may even self reflect on
them sometimes, but then anot r message arrives, another like on Facebook,
another post o Insta and we are back, tapping and scrolling our lives awa
A bag
with unexpected goodies
Honest confession time.
I’ve had moments of doubt ab my own column and what I do. Am I in some way also
propagating and becoming a catalyst in this move towards mindless slavery to
our device? It’s been on the back of my mind for a while, until a big bag
arrived one day at my house that changed it all. Emblazoned on the outside was
the name ‘Motorola’. Thinking it was a new phone that had been sent in for
review, I opened it up only to find it contained some very strange and
unexpected items. A huge bag full of classic games. Board games – Pictionary,
Scrabble and Jenga. A phone manufacturer propagating the idea that we should
move away from our phone and spend some time with friends and family playing
these non-digital games? Wasn’t that counterproductive? Weren’t they vilifying
the very product they sold? The plot had thickened. It was time to dive deeper.
True
slavery
Phones today have become
omnipotent, omnipresent and omnieverything! In India, there are 300 million
smartphone users and growing exponentially. It’s what we use every day for
everything. But while the smartphone brings us closer to those who are far
away, it separates us from those who are right in front of us. While it makes
us connect with more in quantity, it completely destroys the quality of that
connection. Teenagers have turned into screenagers, friends have turned into
machines and restaurants have become Instagram ATMs. But just how addicted are
we?
Who we
are
There is a quiz being
played out all over the world and some very interesting insights are coming out
– 42% Indians find it easier to stay away from their families for a week than
their phones, 100% respondents keep their phone within arm’s reach for an
average of 21 hours, 58% Indians use their phones while they are using the
toilet (!!), 81% people check their phone during a wedding ceremony, while
making out (!!), in a shower, or at a funeral! How much of the above is you?
Google ‘Phone Life Balance Quiz’ and let me know what you scored.
What
not to do
Now that we’ve
established who the slave is, what do we do next? Lots, actually. The most
important one is not to blow it out of proportion. Don’t give up your phone
completely or fall into a trap of going to a place where they take it away from
you for a period of time. Don’t digital detox. That’s even more brainless than your
slavery. The minute you think of it like that, it also establishes that a phone
is toxic. It’s not. The smartphone is the single greatest piece of technology
ever to have been created! The problem is not the phone, it’s our mindless
usage of it.
Three easy
things
Let’s start things off
slowly to get some control back. Here are three things I did that were easy,
didn’t require any major sacrifice and completely changed my phone-life
balance. 1. Don’t charge your phone in your room. Put it on charge in a different
place and you’re spending more time with family in the evening, you’re not
checking your phone at all at night and doing a lot of interesting non-phone
related things in the morning. 2. Take all your social media apps and instant
messaging apps from the home screen and put them inside a folder on the last
screen. Now you won’t be checking them in that brain-dead machine-like manner
that we all do. 3. Check yourself before you check your phone. Ask yourself –
am I expecting something earth shatteringly urgent, a critical message, a
life-altering post, an email that will change the world? If not, defer it and
check every two hours. It’s easy and works. Make a start, rediscover the joy of
talking to a real human being, tickle that dog that’s been looking longingly at
you, break open a game that the whole family will enjoy. Jenga anyone?
·
Rajiv Makhni is managing editor, Technology, N
HTBR10DEC17
No comments:
Post a Comment