Has the advent of mobile devices damaged the way people relate to one another nowadays? People often don’t talk to one another as much as they once did in social situations (such as restaurants) because they seem to prefer to be on their mobile device.
Has the widespread use of such devices damaged the art of conversation?
The trendy consensus is that smartphones have had a negative effect on social relations. I don’t have any data to hand, but my anec-data don’t totally support this.
Let’s say you have two people together in a bar/restaurant, and both are looking at their phones & not talking to one another - for whatever reason. I think it’s a stretch to say that if mobile phones didn’t exist these two would be engaged in lively, witty discourse - and that the only thing keeping them apart is modern technology. On the contrary, I’d assume that these people are either both preoccupied with something, or that they don’t enjoy each other’s company - taking their phones out of the equation won’t help to improve conversation, it will just make things tense or awkward.
Perhaps there are certain situations where strangers are together in public (such as waiting for a bus, or in a dentist’s waiting room) when pre-mobile phones people would talk to each other (out of boredom, perceived social necessity or whatever), but now people do not. Having grown up in the south-east of England, however, I have never had much first-hand experience of this. As I recall, strangers talk to each other in public nowadays just as much as they did 10-20-30 years ago. In the old days people read newspapers or whatever to pass the time in public places, now they read their phone screens.
If anything, mobile phones have a mild social catalyst effect. Now, when I am talking to someone I know I can show them photos of my family/play funny videos/share music etc…; this adds to the social experience - if anything, smart phones enrich conversation - or at least they certainly have the potential to.
I work with teenagers, and it is true that they are on their phones a lot. But, they are invariably communicating - albeit in ways and with codes and protocols which are quite alien to adults. Do they spend more time on their phones - and therefore spend less time on face-to-face contact - than teenagers 20 years ago? Perhaps, but it would be wrong to describe them as anti-social (if anything, today’s teenagers are hyper-social - they probably communicate more things to more people than any other generation in history). Plus, it would (again) be wrong to assume that if you had a group of teenagers all playing with their phones, and all of a sudden said phones vanished, that they would magically start talking to one another. In my teenage years my friends and I spent many an hour not really talking or doing anything in each other’s company. Smartphones would have enriched our social lives, not impoverished them.
Long story short, people prioritise between their phones and the people that they are physically with. Sometimes, the phone takes priority over the other person - this isn’t necessarily something to lament - there are many perfectly good reasons for it. In the old days we didn’t have that choice; now we do.
When you meet someone in a restaurant for business or for pleasure, that is, you are there for the purpose of talking to them, do you pull out your phone in the middle of the conversation?? At least pretend you have to go to the toilet or out for a smoke.
Doing that would be rude and/or unprofessional, unless accompanied by an apologetic and plausible explanatory disclaimer (‘really sorry but I’m expecting a very important call - would you mind awfully if I have my phone out?..’ - I did just that at a meeting a few days ago, in fact…). If someone is with someone else with the express intention of talking to them then starts playing with their phone mid-conversation then the mobile phone itself is not the thing to blame. Once again, if you magically removed the phone from the situation the rude person would still be a rude person, they would simply find another way to offend their companion.
Part of it is the social impact of people running into each other because they’re walking along immersed in their cellphones.
Potentially more devastating is the physical impact of cellphone zombies walking into walls, oncoming traffic etc.
Remember, unless you posted it to Facebook or another platform, it didn’t happen.
I’m basically one who laments the proliferation of mobile device & social media, but I’m also a hypocrite. I’ve been thinking of deleting my Facebook account for at least a good several years but just can’t do it for whatever reason. I guess I’m afraid of losing contact with people I never actually contact anyway, but it’s the fact that I could easily do so if I wanted to that keeps me hanging on.
Likewise, with mobile devices, I keep my smartphone on me at all times and I check my email whenever I have a free moment. Not because I’m anticipating any interesting mail or messages, but I just don’t want to miss one if I actually happen to get some ‘news’ with any real gravity.
That being said, I am somewhat proud of myself that I can occasionally go almost an entire Saturday without checking my phone. And I am resistant to the latest technologies like smart home devices and such. I don’t need a smart TV. I don’t need smart locks or security cams that allow me to check my home using the internet while i’m away.
But don’t you think that smartphones can be too addictive? There is nothing wrong with such devices as long as we are in control of them and not vice-versa. They offer so many services that perhaps people feel they can go nowhere without them, which I find a little concerning.
Not so much for important meetings, no, but I was thinking more of social situations where once, people did not have so many distractions so they were freer to talk with one another. I know not everyone would automatically socialize without phones but now, it seems, very often it is the phone that is preferred to face to face communication. I don’t want to overstate this or generalize too much but you can see this happening quite often when out and about and perhaps is more prevalent with younger people. I do think mobile devices encourage a withdrawal from reality into ‘hyperspace.’ This may not be so good because it seems to offers solutions to problems found on the Internet rather than trying to confront them on your own.
The devices themselves? No.
It’s the social media and chat apps. They’re designed to elicit Pavlovian response so you spend more time on them, so they can collect more data and sell you shit. They work perfectly.
And there it is. 
I don’t have a smartphone. I have a fake Facebook account I use a few times a year for stalking/due diligence.
All of which means I have a lot of free time, which allows me to do things like make appointments more than an hour in advance and actually show up, and nobody knows what I’m doing unless I want them to, not that anybody cares, lol. And I don’t get drawn into other people’s endless made-up dramas, although I know for a lot of people, that’s what life is about.
I’d say the overall impact is that nobody pays attention to anything for more than 30 seconds, everybody’s just seeking/waiting for the next ping. I think that has implications for productivity somewhere down the line, although I think there’s a bit of an offset because smartphones allow you to work 24 hours a day.
But what happens is, you are doing 8 hours of work, but executing it over 16 hours.
I think if you took office workers’ smartphones from them at the beginning of the day, you could end up laying off about 1/3 of them.
If I send an email with 3 questions to a phone-addicted person, I invariably get 1 question answered. Rinse and repeat.
You may be right but I still feel some people are almost dominated by their phones.
Well, one of the main aspects of a mobile phone is that you can carry it everywhere you go so I guess you just get used to it being with you. Other stuff, like T.V’s, etc. have to be left at home and forgotten about until you return.
We old farts just aren’t getting it.
When you see a group of teenagers huddled around a table all looking at their phones, they are not ignoring each other for the piece of electronica. They are engaged in a communal experience including all their friends who were not able to be at that table at that time.
My fifteen-year-old daughter put it thusly: “Dad, we are not ignoring each other. We are including all of our friends who couldn’t make it because of one reason or another. McKenna has to be at her brother’s soccer game. McKayla is at her grandparents. Katie isn’t feeling well, and with her mother, is no way she is going to be here.”
The affinity for the teenage girl for the telephone has been a known thing since the 1940s… why do people keep acting surprised/shocked/dismayed to find this still continues?
Maybe, maybe not. abashed has already brought up the addictive properties of smartphones and social media. Perhaps these people really would enjoy interacting in person, but the addictive pull of their devices is just too strong.
It’s clear to me that the advent of mobile devices has changed the way people relate to one another nowadays. Has it damaged it? I’d say that in some ways it’s better, in some ways it’s worse, and in some ways it’s just different.
I was amused to observe a couple of students on my university campus a few months ago. They were holding hands as they strolled across campus. In their free hands each one held a smartphone, which they were looking at with great intensity. I watched them for quite a while and they never once looked at each other or exchanged a single word. Ah, young love.
Some people are I am sure ‘addicted’ to their phones, in the sense that they would feel panicked or uncomfortable without them. I am one of those people… I, in fact, have two phones with me all the time: one is a work phone (I am the legal guardian of ~140 foreign children in the UK at the moment - long story…), and the other my personal phone. The work phone is connected to my smart watch via Bluetooth, which buzzes and pings me all of the phone’s notifications (texts, Whatsapp messages, notifications from our work Facebook page, etc…) as soon as they occur - just in case I don’t have my work phone on my person. I am ludicrously well-connected, because I have to be - if I were to suddenly lose both phones I would be a nervous wreck, and I wouldn’t be able to do my job properly.
Still, my constant connectivity is for work and child welfare - which is I think a fair justification. What about ‘social media junkies’ who spend hours on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook? The idea of people shunning face-to-face communication in order to participate in the voyeuristic/narcissistic rituals of exchanging selfies etc… feels somewhat repulsive; like they are choosing the virtual world over the actual one because it is, to them, more appealing (and perhaps they feel that their virtual selves are more appealing than their actual selves). But, this is something of an extreme caricature - it might describe some people but not most. I see no evidence that there is a pandemic of catastrophic social media addiction.
People use social media a lot because they like to stay in touch with other people. They don’t like being away from it because they don’t like being disconnected from people that they like and love. Firstly, losing your phone/Facebook account/whatever essentially means losing touch with your extended social circle; it’s understandable that many find that prospect disconcerting. In the past people didn’t really have active extended social circles (apart from very occasional long distance phone calls, letters, postcards, etc… - these kinds of correspondence were seldom regular). You would have no idea how your cousin in Australia was doing, and they probably wouldn’t cross your mind very often. Now, people do know (or at least have the ability to find out easily). Why would anyone want to give that up?
Secondly - and with teenagers especially - social media augments actual interpersonal relationships. Friendships and relationships develop and are maintained (and deteriorate) through a complicated symphony of online and real-world interaction. Take away the online element and you are essentially socially handicapped. For many a socially aware 14 year-old, to forgo social media entirely - even for a relatively short period - would be strategically disastrous. It is rational and understandable for teenagers to be ‘plugged in’ all day, and to feel uncomfortable if they are ‘unplugged’. There are good and bad sides to this constant connectivity. Teenagers have more ways to stay in touch with each other (and their parents); that’s nice. Then there is cyber-bullying and teen sexting, which aren’t. (As the father of a 2 year-old girl I am terrified of how she will be using the technology of 2030, but that’s a subject for another thread…)
I’m old enough to remember having to stay home because I was expecting an important call. Then we got answering machines. So I hauled around quarters so I could check my messages from pay phones. Then I could call back and leave a message- or, if I was lucky -maybe the person would’ve stayed home to wait for my call
It easy for people that are way younger than me to take the ease of communication that we enjoy today for granted. Yes, maybe some people are too absorbed by their devices but I think it’s a net positive.
I gather that some people are ‘addicted’ to social media in a sort of medical sense (with parallels to other behavioural addictions such as gambling); it is bad for them, they most likely know it is bad for them, but they can’t help themselves and do it anyway. Their addiction thus has negative real-world repercussions (problems with work, strained relationships with family, etc…). I understand this also happens with online gaming - in the far East in particular. For these individuals, I empathise - they are unwell.
But for most the ‘addictive pull’ you describe is someone deciding at that moment in time that they would rather interact in the virtual world than the actual one. This might occasionally mean two (or more) people being in each other’s company and not speaking to one another for a while. As long as this is mutually consensual I don’t see this as a profound social ill. If you take a look around a pub in England nowadays (which, in fact, I might shortly do - purely in the name of research…) most people will be talking, and a few will be (temporarily) on their phones. I don’t see this as indicative of societal breakdown.
I’m also not totally on board with the idea that Facebook and other social media platforms are sinister, Orwellian machines of mind control and societal oppression designed to dumb down the populace in preparation for the coming of the New World Order. Are they cleverly - and sometimes perhaps a bit scarily, sneakily and unethically - designed to grab people’s attention (and personal information) in order to sell advertising? Sure! That’s their business model, and the successful ones are evidently very good at it. It is not in Zuckerberg’s interests for everyone to be ‘addicted’ to Facebook, though: if everyone were on it 24 hours a day, no-one would have any money to buy the stuff they advertise
In addition to facilitating his business model, Zuckerberg believes that everybody’s life should be an open book, he thinks it will make the world a better place.