Post by DADDY O on May 17, 2017 0:46:36 GMT
I just read an interesting book titled "12 Ways Your Smartphone is Changing You". The book has good information in it, but I did not know when I purchased it that the main theme was "Christian" oriented. I don't have a problem with religious people, but I'm not one of them......so I edited out the references to the "Higher Being".
Anyhow, I bought the book on Kindle, which allowed me to cut and past various excerpts........so here is the "Nickle Tour of the Book", which again is the 12 Ways Your Smartphone is Changing You.
1 - We Are Addicted to Distraction
We check our smartphones about 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives. Our lives are consolidated on our phones: our calendars, our cameras, our pictures, our work, our workouts, our reading, our writing, our credit cards, our maps, our news, our weather, our email, our shopping…………..all of it can be managed with state-of-the-art apps in powerful little devices we carry everywhere.
2 - We Ignore Our Flesh and Blood
We know we should not neglect others, but we ignore our consciences and do it anyway. This neglect takes on a most dangerous form in the phenomenon of distracted driving. Texting and driving is such a commonplace habit, the stats are now canonical. Talking on the phone while driving a vehicle makes you four times more likely to get into an accident, but texting while driving makes your chance of a crash twenty-three times more likely. Assuming a driver never looks up in the average time it takes to send a text (4.6 seconds), at fifty-five miles per hour, he drives blindly the length of a football field. Texting and driving is so idiotic, forty-six of fifty states have banned it.
3 - We Crave Immediate Approval
In the digital age, we can ignore bodies, but we can also abuse them. Meet Essena O’Neill, who, as a nineteen-year-old Australian model, accumulated five hundred thousand Instagram followers. Once poised to make a career from online endorsement deals, in 2015 she called it quits, deleted most of her pictures, and revised the remaining descriptions to unmask the true motives behind the images (mostly sponsored product placements). Why the drastic move? Essena had come to see that her online life was hollow, fake, and self-centered.
4 - We Lose Our Literacy
We no longer read books, or have discussions with our peers. Instead we text, and we have developed an entirely new language to do so more efficiently…….do u knw wht I mean?
5 - We Feed on the Produced
Fish live in water. Celebrities live in replicating images. For celebrities to survive another day, they must find ways of replicating images of themselves over and over. Celebrities must stay in the news— that is their job— and the corporations that bank on the celebrities need to keep pushing those icons forward, too. This means celebrity culture survives on cameras— lots and lots of cameras: still cameras, video cameras, studio cameras, paparazzi cameras, and fan cameras. Not only do our smartphones have sharp cameras that capture quality images and video, those cameras are always with us, and we have developed fidgety “shutter” trigger fingers, ready to capture anything in the moment. Taken together, we not only consume celebrity culture, we now feed the culture, too.
6 - We Become Like What We “Like”
The words and images we share on our phones influence others. But the words and images we consume transform us. Remember the story of Narcissus? He was an attractive chap, but he was also arrogant and incapable of receiving love or giving love to anyone. For his frigid affection, the goddess Nemesis cursed him in a most hopeless way, making him fall in love with the image he projected of himself. Day after day, he bent over and caught his reflection in the glassy surface of the water, longing for the image he saw, so much so that one day he noticed his reflection in the bottom of a well, jumped in, and drowned.
7 - We Get Lonely
A middle-aged homeless man sits alone on a sunny city sidewalk, back against a fence, dozing. Karim, a generous passerby, approaches and stands above him with cash in hand. The man on the street startles awake, flinches in self-defense, and clutches his backpack of belongings. As his eyes adjust to the sunlight, he sees the outstretched hand and takes the money with gratitude. They begin to chat, and the homeless man introduces himself as Mark. In a role reversal, Mark grabs his grubby backpack, asks Karim to wait a moment, stands up, and walks off with the cash, leaving Karim alone on the street. Mark returns moments later with a plastic bag and two Styrofoam boxes. Mark used the handout to buy two dinners— one to share. “Please sit and eat with me for a little bit?” Mark asks. Karim is surprised, but agrees and sits down on the concrete. “I’m glad you’re here with me,” the homeless man says, as they sit on the sidewalk and unbox their dinners together. “It’s lonely out here. People walk by and they ignore me. They could care less if I was dead or alive. It’s great just to sit out here with somebody.”
8 - We Get Comfortable in Secret Vices
By nature, we are needy consumers. We are designed to take and eat, to receive material gifts in order to survive, and to drink from the water of life. However, consumerism is the idea that all of life can be converted into commodities, then controlled and monetized. The catchphrase “There’s an app for that” is a reigning motto for the consumerist spirit in the smartphone age. Today, all of our activities and interests (and even our relationships) can be rendered into discrete tabulations, like in Snapchat, where relational connections are reduced to points and where “Snapstreaks” can be maintained by connecting at least once every twenty-four hours with particular friends. In fact, “the technology of social media is becoming more ‘gamified’ by the year as developers learn how to tap into the deep human hunger for simulations of authority and vulnerability.”
For instance, Ashley Madison is a Canadian web-based subscription service targeting married men and women seeking to initiate anonymous connections with other aspiring adulterers. The site’s slogan could not be more simple (or insipid): “Life is short. Have an affair.”
9 - We Lose Meaning
The average output of email and social-media text is estimated at 3.6 trillion words, or about thirty-six million books— typed out every day! In comparison, the Library of Congress holds thirty-five million books. We now live in an information deluge only dystopian novelists could have foreseen. In the introduction to his landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman contrasted two very different cultural warnings, those of George Orwell’s 1984 and of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell argued that books would disappear by censorship; Huxley thought books would be marginalized by data torrent. Postman summarizes the contrast well. “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” Huxley seems to have won.
10 - We Fear Missing Out
Missing a potential spouse, missing a perfect job offer, missing a golden stock tip, or missing a party with our friends— missing out leaves a sting of regret we all hate. Foresight is blurry, but hindsight is 20/20, and that means we remember our past misses with crystal clarity.
11 - We Become Harsh to One Another
What should I do with the dirt I have on you? That’s a question we all face at some point. Our smartphones makes it easy for us to thrash on it.
12 - We Lose Our Place in Time
Whether we realize it or not, every waking moment of our lives, we are asking ourselves questions: What should I do? What should I say? What should I stop? What should I start? We exist in time and space, and the priceless moment before us is ours to embrace.
Conclusion - Living Smartphone Smart
In the last twelve chapters, I have warned against twelve corresponding ways in which our smartphones are changing us and undermining our mental health: Our phones amplify our addiction to distractions and thereby splinter our perception of our place in time. Our phones push us to evade the limits of embodiment and thereby cause us to treat one another harshly.
Our phones feed our craving for immediate approval and promise to hedge against our fear of missing out. Our phones undermine key literary skills and, because of our lack of discipline, make it increasingly difficult for us to identify ultimate meaning. Our phones offer us a buffet of produced media and tempt us to indulge in visual vices. Our phones overtake and distort our identity and tempt us toward unhealthy isolation and loneliness.
