Experts have attempted to discover possible links between cell phones and disease for a while now, but a new kind of disease has recently stepped into the running: addiction.
Everyone knows at least one person who acts as though his or her mobile phone usage is vitally linked to survival; the avid BlackBerry user, the iPhone enthusiast, or the texting fiend of any model.
Are they addicted to using this handheld technology in the same way as an alcoholic experiences addiction? If so, what do we do with the subsequent hoards of CrackBerry users in need of an intervention?
David Greenfield, a leading Internet-related behavior psychologist sees a grim picture when he looks at those who find it hard to put down their devices.
“Since phones don't weigh much and fit easily into a pocket or a purse, the threshold is even easier to cross, and there's no end to it. You're pretty much hooked in wherever you are, if you want to be."
If your phone is a useful part of your daily life, you can’t just give it up and leave it entirely behind. However, for the sake of your relationships, it’s best to reach a moderate middle ground.
It is just flat out impossible to have two quality conversations at the same time, although the amount of attempts to do so seem increasingly ardent and constant among cell phone junkies.
If you are texting someone for more than three messages back and forth, you have chosen that conversation and forfeited your legitimate claim to participating in another. Life is full of choices, so make yours and stick to it, one exchange of gossip and venting at a time.
New York Times columnist and author, Robert Wright, has spent the majority of his career examining what exactly happens to humans as we persist in creating what he calls “super brains” through Internet and other mobile technologies that generate increasingly large social networks that seem to think together in a group.
He poses an interesting question that the current college-age generation will undoubtedly confront in the near future.
“Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution — both the biological evolution that created an intelligent species and the technological evolution that a sufficiently intelligent species is bound to unleash — has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain?” Wright suggests.
Maybe cell phone junkies are really just ahead of the pack and riding the cutting edge of the next wave of human evolution.
What about the individual brains that make up the super brain? What about the brains responsible for showing affection and undivided attention to friends, children, romantic partners and peers?
Any hypothesis that encourages more people to bury their heads into endless hours of texting or frantic checking of email messages every 30 seconds is a theory we should all work hard to disprove and avoid.
Wright might have some insight into the future of mobile technology, but if there is life to be forged in a super brain, there is equally a kind of life to be maintained and valued in the realm of single to single brain interaction we would do well to observe will equal attention.
Cell phones don’t belong on dinner tables; good food and conversation don't appreciate or deserve such an invasion. Glancing down at your phone every five minutes when you are somewhere new is a shallow replacement for growing up and using your big kid words to strike up a conversation.
If there were a new age, post technology commandment, I’m sure it would read: Love thyself and thy comrades more than thy cell phone.
E-mail me while not talking to someone else at abethancourt@gmail.com
