If you go out with your family to a bowling alley or an arcade for an evening out, you’ll see people trying for strikes and spares, and you’ll see people playing video games and Skee-Ball. However, in between their turns in the alley, or while they’re waiting for a lane to open up or their pizza to come, you’re not likely to see other groups of people visiting with one another. Instead, they’ll be looking down at their laps or at the table – and in their hands, they’ll be holding their cell phones, typing away or scrolling through the latest social media posts. The people they decided to spend the evening with (at least in terms of physical presence) are likely to be doing the same thing with their own phones, devotedly ignoring other while they post on social media about the great time they are having. While the smartphone has brought about a great measure of progress, it has also caused significant change in the ways in which people interact with one another and is changing the way people’s internal rhythms work.
It is true that the smartphone makes life a lot more convenient for people. Do you have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon? If you got an email confirmation from the doctor’s office, your phone likely integrated the schedule information from the message and automatically added it to your calendar for the day. Because your smartphone knows where you are – as well as the address of your doctor’s office – it will send you an alert (if you have the right app) when it thinks you need to leave if you’re going to be on time, depending on existing traffic conditions in the city where you live. If you’ve added your daily events to your calendar – including the location – you can automatically get the phone to tell you how to get where you need to go. While you’re out of the office and at that doctor’s appointment, you can still stay in touch because you can sync your work email to your phone. Your boss and associates can text you or even use such apps as Google Hangouts to keep a running conversation with you.
So why is this a bad thing? There are two reasons. First, the fact that you can always be productive means that you are less likely to allow yourself to rest – both physically and mentally – and more likely to remain connected to your electronic devices from the time you wake up until the time you finally pass out at the end of the evening. You’re always accessible to the people at work who think they need to be in touch with you 24/7. You can write papers, put together spreadsheets and assemble slide shows all from your phone – which means that you can be productive anywhere. So when do you turn things off and decide to rest? The drive to work is one of the basic elements of the human personality, but the fact that a smartphone makes you a nonstop potential worker makes supervisors more likely to expect people to put in hours around the clock instead of working a traditional day. As a result, people are not only more likely to neglect their own personal need for rest and relaxation but are also more likely to neglect their primary relationships, working more and more – and being less present when they’re not in the office but instead constantly staring down at that phone in their hand and responding to every vibration or tone that comes from it.
The second reason why this is damaging has to do with the way that people relate with one another. Empathy is one of the most important emotional abilities that people must develop. If you look at what seems to be a growing list of social problems, whether it’s income inequality or racial injustice, whether it’s the growing reliance of teenage boys on porn and video games to provide their primary forms of entertainment and interaction or the fact that a rape culture still exists for too many women as we move further into the twenty-first century, it is that a lack of empathy appears to be at the base of many of these problems. If you have an emotional common ground with a person, you’re much less likely to force them to have sex with you, to pull them over for flimsy traffic stops simply because they look different than you, to ignore charitable appeals on the behalf of people you just don’t understand, or to demean people for the simple fact that they’re not exactly like you in terms of ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation. The problem is that it’s just about impossible to build empathy while spending time on a smartphone. Our social media apps are tailored to bring us content that suits things we already like to look at – which means that differing points of view are slowly culled out of the feed that we see on a daily basis. Over time, we become enveloped in a mental and emotional cocoon that protects our own conceptions and beliefs while making those that are different seem almost alien in comparison. Without empathy, it’s difficult to have the long-lasting sorts of feelings that make significant relationships work over time. Instead of transmitting values to their children, parents rely on smartphones and gaming systems to entertain their children too often – and the parents are often on the smartphones themselves more often than they need to be. As a result, the value of empathy – a practice that takes long-term attention spans lasting much longer than 140 characters – is atrophying in our culture.
Works Cited
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Web. 22 July 2015.
<http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden02.html>
