What happens when we are alone with nothing to do for even few minutes (rather in some cases- few seconds) ? - We pull out a nice shinning device from our pocket called our Smartphone.
And if we don't have that , we feel handicapped & uncomfortable.
Numerous stats are available all over the net to prove the addiction.
So, lets get down to reasons right away.
Reason 1 – Remaining Social.
We want to be connected. Fear of losing out on any
notification, no matter how inconsequential the post, message or email is.
A study by Google in 2011, says that about 89% use smart
phones to be connected via email & social media.
So, why do we want to be social? An apt answer can be
derived from the excerpt from Sherry Turkle’s article, an MIT professor. “We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections offer the illusion
of companionship without the demands of friendship. We expect more from
technology and less from each other”.
Reason 2 – Information overload.
There about 60 trillion Webpages (and growing) on the
internet. And, we live in a world where we have to remain updated about
everything in within minutes of the news/development.There is so much pressure to know things, we
just gulp the information. We don’t interpret it and if we do, we might lose out on the new information
which is about to surface.
Nicholas Carr in his blog, highlights a related point
extensively. He points out that, people (including from literally background)
are losing patience and concentration required to read long articles.
We are so used to reading small snippets of information on the
web (e.g. twitter 140 characters), which makes it impossible to read through
a long article (no matter how interesting/important it is).
We feel comfortable
multitasking, reading numerous topics in a shortest possible time available.
Infact we are kill our ability to concentrate, analyse & interpret information, again making us
less productive by using our Smartphones
more often.
Reason 3 - Intimidated by
Boredom
So here’s a rhetoric question; When was the last time you spent
an hour (forget a day) without any electronic device?
Why do we do that? Probable reason could be boredom.
Living with oneself is understood to be one of the most
difficult tasks; it supposedly makes us ask difficult questions to ourselves. And
we are so scared by that, we search some other activity to engage ourselves
into. So we take out our phones to fill the “gaps” (as called by Joe Kraus) of
our day.