Our minds focus on unusual, dramatic possibilities: the broken-down car on a dark and lonely highway; a health emergency where immediate contact is essential. But in reality those scenarios are extremely rare — rarer, no doubt, than accidents while texting or muggers preying on distracted phone users.
Focusing on them leads to biased assessment of risk, which, in turn, contributes to a biased assessment of smartphones' utility.
I appreciate the discussion, but the argument is disingenuous. Here's a man who:
- carries an iPod Touch
- relies on a Garmin when he's out and about
- forces his running group to email him separately
...but argues for the virtue of "being alone with your thoughts."
My wife used to deliver babies for Hasidic Jews in Hollywood. They were pretty strict about the "no electricity during the Sabbath" thing. Which didn't mean they didn't take phone calls or use electric light; it meant they went to the neighbor's house and asked them to make phone calls for them, or got bystanders to flip the light switch, or asked people to look stuff up on the Internet for them. If you wanted to see them, you had to come to them because they couldn't travel by car. So really, the pain in the ass of not using modern technology was externalized to the friends who will put up with your shit - it doesn't go away.
I've had a smart phone since 2002. I got it because if I was going to be forced to lug a bullshit piece of tech around with me, it would at least check email and run Excel (which they did back then). But I didn't get it for me, and I didn't get it because i wanted it - I got it because my friends were getting physically angry at me that they couldn't get ahold of me to coordinate unless I was at my house or my desk at work, and I didn't spend a lot of time at either location. To me, getting a phone was a concession to the people around me, whose lifestyles had evolved into permanent connectedness. I could either go along or be the Hasidic Jew that makes other people flip lightswitches for them, and that isn't my style.
Honestly? My phone is an iPod, a fitness tracker and that thing I look at useless shit on while watching Netflix. I make few calls on it and text little. but it can do all that shit without having to be on WiFi... 'cuz if you're going to carry around an iPod Touch while talking about how you don't have a smartphone, I'm going to call bullshit on your argument.
It's not that you're avoiding technology. It's that you're making your friends carry it around for you.