Smartphone Fears

 A persistent strand of opinion holds that scepticism about smartphones and social media is fogeyish or alarmist, the inevitable preoccupation of the sorts of people who would have lain awake in 1968 worrying about Mick Jagger's haircut. Even the government's apparently banal case that smartphones are distracting is not uncontroversial. The journalist Johann Hari's recent book, Stolen Focus, about smartphone's impact on our ability to concentrate was met with bitter criticism...

  Every teacher will attest to the disruption caused by phones. As will anybody who has tried to read a novel in the past ten years. A recent study suggests that the average teenager receives 237 notifications a day.

The most compelling case for a smartphone ban is made by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has argued that an "international epidemic of mental illness" among teenagers should be blamed on phones. The majority of teenage girls "now say that they experience persistent sadness and hopelessness" (57 per cent, up from 36 per cent in 2011) and 30 per cent have considered suicide (up from 19 per cent in 2011)...

'Anxiety', Head of a Girl
Jean Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805)
Photo Credit: Victoria Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] 

The notion that a new technology might be bad for us is disturbing and counterintuitive. Technological optimism is one of the most deeply ingrained habits of our culture...

They (the digital technologies of the 21st century) are different from those that have gone before. They are the emanations of a Silicon Valley culture that values not curiosity and idealism but profit and power...

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, said he is "scared" of his technology, which threatens "significant harm to the world" and "risk of extinction"... But the executives of modern tech companies are better appraised of the dangers of their technology than anyone. Facebook commissioned internal research which showed that Instagram harmed teenage girls' mental health. Steve Jobs refused to allow his children access to iPhones and iPads...

This is not to argue that technology is inevitably evil. Only that pessimism should not be dismissed out of hand... It's right to to ban phones in schools. I even sympathise with my colleague Juliet Samuel's suggestion that phones should be banned for under-16s, full stop. Sometimes the Luddites are right.

(James Marriott, The Times, 2023)

It has to be noted that much criticism of Hari's book centres on his apparent failure to cite the primary sources for some of the studies he used in the book. Having said that it is a little disturbing to hear from the experts in modern tech companies that all is not well with the state of modern technology.