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Smartphones may be changing the way we think.

Those attention-grabbing digital devices are like a new appendage. How are they changing us?

DIGITAL MINDS   Smartphones offer ways to connect, store data and get directions. But what exactly digital tech does to our brains is still an unanswered question. 

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By Laura Sanders

March 17, 2017 at 12:21 pm

Not too long ago, the internet was stationary. Most often, we’d browse the Web from a desktop computer in our living room or office. If we were feeling really adventurous, maybe we’d cart our laptop to a coffee shop. Looking back, those days seem quaint.

Today, the internet moves through our lives with us. We hunt Pokémon as we shuffle down the sidewalk. We text at red lights. We tweet from the bathroom. We sleep with a smartphone within arm’s reach, using the device as both lullaby and alarm clock. Sometimes we put our phones down while we eat, but usually faceup, just in case something important happens.

Our iPhones, Androids and other smartphones have led us to effortlessly adjust our behavior. Portable technology has overhauled our driving habits, our dating styles and even our posture . Despite the occasional headlines claiming that digital technology is rotting our brains, not to mention what it’s doing to our children, we’ve welcomed this alluring life partner with open arms and swiping thumbs.

Scientists suspect that these near-constant interactions with digital technology influence our brains. Small studies are turning up hints that our devices may change how we remember, how we navigate and how we create happiness — or not.

Portion of Americans who reported using a technology device in the hour before bedtime

Source: Michael Gradisar et al/J. Clin. Sleep Med. 2013

Portion of U.S. college students who reported checking their phones at least once overnight

Source: L. Rosen et al/Sleep Health 2016

Somewhat limited, occasionally contradictory findings illustrate how science has struggled to pin down this slippery, fast-moving phenomenon. Laboratory studies hint that technology, and its constant interruptions, may change our thinking strategies. Like our husbands and wives, our devices have become “memory partners,” allowing us to dump information there and forget about it — an off-loading that comes with benefits and drawbacks. Navigational strategies may be shifting in the GPS era, a change that might be reflected in how the brain maps its place in the world. Constant interactions with technology may even raise anxiety in certain settings.

Yet one large study that asked people about their digital lives suggests that moderate use of digital technology has no ill effects on mental well-being.

The question of how technology helps and hinders our thinking is incredibly hard to answer. Both lab and observational studies have drawbacks. The artificial confines of lab experiments lead to very limited sets of observations, insights that may not apply to real life, says experimental psychologist Andrew Przybylski of the University of Oxford. “This is a lot like drawing conclusions about the effects of baseball on players’ brains after observing three swings in the batting cage.”

Observational studies of behavior in the real world, on the other hand, turn up associations, not causes. It’s hard to pull out real effects from within life’s messiness. The goal, some scientists say, is to design studies that bring the rigors of the lab to the complexities of real life, and then to use the resulting insights to guide our behavior. But that’s a big goal, and one that scientists may never reach.

Evolutionary neurobiologist Leah Krubitzer is comfortable with this scientific ambiguity. She doesn’t put a positive or negative value on today’s digital landscape. Neither good nor bad, it just is what it is: the latest iteration on the continuum of changing environments, says Krubitzer, of the University of California, Davis.

“I can tell you for sure that technology is changing our brains,” she says. It’s just that so far, no one knows what those changes mean.

Of course, nearly everything changes the brain. Musical training reshapes parts of the brain. Learning the convoluted streets of London swells a mapmaking structure in the brains of cabbies. Even getting a good night’s sleep changes the brain. Every aspect of our environment can influence brain and behaviors. In some ways, digital technology is no different. Yet some scientists suspect that there might be something particularly pernicious about digital technology’s grip on the brain.

“We are information-seeking creatures,” says neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco. “We are driven to it in very powerful ways.” Today’s digital tools give us unprecedented exposure to information that doesn’t wait for you to seek it out; it seeks you out, he says. That pull is nearly irresistible.

Despite the many unanswered questions about whether our digital devices are influencing our brains and behaviors, and whether for good or evil, technology is galloping ahead. “We should have been asking ourselves [these sorts of questions] in the ’70s or ’80s,” Krubitzer says. “It’s too late now. We’re kind of closing the barn doors after the horses got out.”

Story continues after graphic

A team in the United Kingdom designed an Android app to track cell phone use in students and staff at the University of Lincoln for 15 days. The app registered when the phone’s screen turned on and then off, resulting in charts like the one below depicting one moderate cell phone user’s daily activity. Wider bars mean longer time on phone. Alarm clock wake-ups on weekdays are obvious. Saturdays are marked by red dashed line.

Attention grabber

One way in which today’s digital technology is distinct from earlier advances (like landline telephones) is the sheer amount of time people spend with it. In just a decade, smartphones have saturated the market, enabling instant internet access to an estimated 2 billion people around the world. In one small study reported in 2015, 23 adults, ages 18 to 33, spent an average of five hours a day on their phones, broken up into 85 distinct daily sessions. When asked how many times they thought they used their phones, participants underestimated by half .

In a different study, Larry Rosen, a psychologist at California State University, Dominguez Hills, used an app to monitor how often college students unlocked their phones. The students checked their phones an average of 60 times a day, each session lasting about three to four minutes for a total of 220 minutes a day. That’s a lot of interruption, Rosen says.

What am I missing?

In one small study of 104 college students, more than half unlocked their phones more than 60 times a day. 

Source: L. Rosen

Smartphones are “literally omnipresent 24-7, and as such, it’s almost like an appendage,” he says. And often, we are compelled to look at this new, alluring rectangular limb instead of what’s around us. “This device is really powerful,” Rosen says. “It’s really influencing our behavior. It’s changed the way we see the world.”

Technology does that. Printing presses, electricity, televisions and telephones all shifted people’s habits drastically, Przybylski says. He proposes that the furor over digital technology melting brains and crippling social lives is just the latest incarnation of the age-old fear of change. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Is there something magical about the power of an LCD screen?’ ” Przybylski says.

Yet some researchers suspect that there is something particularly compelling about this advance. “It just feels different. Computers and the internet and the cloud are embedded in our lives,” says psychologist Benjamin Storm of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The scope of the amount of information we have at our fingertips is beyond anything we’ve ever experienced. The temptation to become really reliant on it seems to be greater.”

Memory outsourcing

Our digital reliance may encourage even more reliance, at least for memory, Storm’s work suggests. Sixty college undergraduates were given a mix of trivia questions — some easy, some hard. Half of the students had to answer the questions on their own; the other half were told to use the internet. Later, the students were given an easier set of questions, such as “What is the center of a hurricane called?” This time, the students were told they could use the internet if they wanted.

People who had used the internet initially were more likely to rely on internet help for the second, easy set of questions, Storm and colleagues reported online last July in Memory . “People who had gotten used to using the internet continued to do so, even though they knew the answer,” Storm says. This kind of overreliance may signal a change in how people use their memory . “No longer do we just rely on what we know,” he says.

“We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools,” Betsy Sparrow, then at Columbia University, and colleagues wrote in 2011. “The experience of losing our internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged in to know what Google knows.”

That digital crutch isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Storm points out. Human memory is notoriously squishy, susceptible to false memories and outright forgetting. The internet, though imperfect, can be a resource of good information. And it’s not clear, he says, whether our memories are truly worse, or whether we perform at the same level, but just reach the answer in a different way.

“Some people think memory is absolutely declining as a result of us using technology,” he says. “Others disagree. Based on the current data, though, I don’t think we can really make strong conclusions one way or the other.”

The potential downsides of this memory outsourcing are nebulous, Storm says. It’s possible that digital reliance influences — and perhaps  even weakens — other parts of our thinking. “Does it change the way we learn? Does it change the way we start to put information together, to build our own stories, to generate new ideas?” Storm asks. “There could be consequences that we’re not necessarily aware of yet.”

Research by Gazzaley and others has documented effects of interruptions and multitasking, which are hard to avoid with incessant news alerts, status updates and Instagrams waiting in our pockets. Siphoning attention can cause trouble for a long list of thinking skills, including short- and long-term memory, attention, perception and reaction time. Those findings, however, come from experiments in labs that ask a person to toggle between two tasks while undergoing a brain scan, for instance. Similar effects have not been as obvious for people going about their daily lives, Gazzaley says. But he is convinced that constant interruptions — the dings and buzzes, our own restless need to check our phones — are influencing our ability to think.

Making maps

Consequences of technology are starting to show up for another cognitive task — navigating, particularly while driving . Instead of checking a map and planning a route before a trip, people can now rely on their smartphones to do the work for them. Anecdotal news stories describe people who obeyed the tinny GPS voice that instructed them to drive into a lake or through barricades at the entrance of a partially demolished bridge. Our navigational skills may be at risk as we shift to neurologically easier ways to find our way, says cognitive neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot of McGill University in Montreal.

Historically, getting to the right destination required a person to have the lay of the land, a mental map of the terrain. That strategy takes more work than one that’s called a “response strategy,” the type of navigating that starts with an electronic voice command. “You just know the response — turn right, turn left, go straight. That’s all you know,” Bohbot says. “You’re on autopilot.”

Google begets Google

Compared with people who had to rely on memory (blue bars) to answer an initial mix of easy and hard trivia questions, people who used Google to find answers (red bars) were more likely to use Google for a second, easy set of questions. Inconvenience (having to get up from the sofa to walk to a computer or an iPod Touch) didn’t stop the Googling.

Source: B.C. Storm, S.M. Stone and A.S. Benjamin/ Memory 2016

A response strategy is easier, but it leaves people with less knowledge. People who walked through a town in Japan with human guides did a better job later navigating the same route than people who had walked with GPS as a companion, researchers have found.

Scientists are looking for signs that video games, which often expose people to lots of response-heavy situations, influence how people get around. In a small study, Bohbot and colleagues found that people who average 18 hours a week playing action video games such as Call of Duty navigated differently than people who don’t play the games . When tested on a virtual maze, players of action video games were more likely to use the simpler response learning strategy to make their way through, Bohbot and colleagues reported in 2015 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B .

That easier type of response navigation depends on the caudate nucleus, a brain area thought to be involved in habit formation and addiction. In contrast, nerve cells in the brain’s hippocampus help create mental maps of the world and assist in the more complex navigation. Some results suggest that people who use the response method have bigger caudate nuclei, and more brain activity there. Conversely, people who use spatial strategies that require a mental map have larger, busier hippocampi.

Those results on video game players are preliminary and show an association within a group that may share potentially confounding similarities. Yet it’s possible that getting into a habit of mental laxity may change the way people navigate. Digital technology isn’t itself to blame, Bohbot says. “It’s not the technology that’s necessarily good or bad for our brain. It’s how we use the technology,” she says. “We have a tendency to use it in the way that seems to be easiest for us. We’re not making the effort.”

Parts of the brain, including those used to navigate, have many jobs. Changing one aspect of brain function with one type of behavior might have implications for other aspects of life. A small study by Bohbot showed that people who navigate by relying on the addiction-related caudate nucleus smoke more cigarettes, drink more alcohol and are more likely to use marijuana than people who rely on the hippocampus. What to make of that association is still very much up in the air.

Sweating the smartphone

Other researchers are trying to tackle questions of how technology affects our psychological outlooks. Rosen and colleagues have turned up clues that digital devices have become a new source of anxiety for people.

Portion of 14- to 18-year-olds who reported always or almost always texting while watching TV

Source: Deloitte 2016 Digital Democracy Survey

In diabolical experiments, Cal State’s Rosen takes college students’ phones away, under the ruse that the devices are interfering with laboratory measurements of stress, such as heart rate and sweating. The phones are left on, but placed out of reach of the students, who are reading a passage. Then, the researchers start texting the students, who are forced to listen to the dings without being able to see the messages or respond. Measurements of anxiety spike, Rosen has found, and reading comprehension dwindles.

Other experiments have found that heavy technology users last about 10 minutes without their phones before showing signs of anxiety.

Fundamentally, an interruption in smartphone access is no different from those in the days before smartphones, when the landline rang as you were walking into the house with bags full of groceries, so you missed the call. Both situations can raise anxiety over a connection missed. But Rosen suspects that our dependence on digital technology causes these situations to occur much more often.

“The technology is magnificent,” he says. “Having said that, I think that this constant bombardment of needing to check in, needing to be connected, this feeling of ‘I can’t be disconnected, I can’t cut the tether for five minutes,’ that’s going to have a long-term effect.”

The question of whether digital technology is good or bad for people is nearly impossible to answer, but a survey of 120,000 British 15-year-olds (99.5 percent reported using technology daily) takes a stab at it. Oxford’s Przybylski and Netta Weinstein at Cardiff University in Wales have turned up hints that moderate use of digital technology — TV, computers, video games and smartphones — correlates with good mental health, measured by questions that asked about happiness, life satisfaction and social activity.

When the researchers plotted technology use against mental well-being, an umbrella-shaped curve emerged, highlighting what the researchers call the “Goldilocks spot” of technology use  — not too little and not too much.

“We found that you’ve got to do a lot of texting before it hurts,” Przybylski says. For smartphone use, the shift from benign to potentially harmful came after about two hours of use on weekdays, mathematical analyses revealed. Weekday recreational computer use had a longer limit: four hours and 17 minutes, the researchers wrote in the February Psychological Science .

Story continues after graphs

British teenagers’ mental well-being, based on a 14-question survey about happiness and life satisfaction, seemed to shift with hours spent using digital media. Scores averaged between 40 and 50. Each type of media had a sweet spot, suggesting that moderate digital technology use may have benefits.

Source: A.K. Przybylski and N. Weinstein/ Psychological Science 2017

For even the heaviest users, the relationship between technology use and poorer mental health wasn’t all that strong. For scale, the potential negative effects of all that screen time was less than a third of the size of the positive effects of eating breakfast, Przybylski and Weinstein found.

Even if a relationship is found between technology use and poorer mental health, scientists still wouldn’t know why, Przybylski says. Perhaps the effect comes from displacing something, such as exercise or socializing, and not the technology itself.

We may never know just how our digital toys shape our brains. Technology is constantly changing, and fast. Our brains are responding and adapting to it.

“The human neocortex basically re-creates itself over successive generations,” Krubitzer says. It’s a given that people raised in a digital environment are going to have brains that reflect that environment. “We went from using stones to crack nuts to texting on a daily basis,” she says. “Clearly the brain has changed.”

It’s possible that those changes are a good thing, perhaps better preparing children to succeed in a fast-paced digital world. Or maybe we will come to discover that when we no longer make the effort to memorize our best friend’s phone number, something important is quietly slipping away.

This article appears in the April 1, 2017, issue of Science News with the headline, “Digital minds: Are smartphones changing our brains?”

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Students wait in front of the Academy of Art in San Francisco.

• VALLEY OF THE BOOM

Smartphones revolutionize our lives—but at what cost?

The computer in our hands can do astonishing things, but new studies show just how dramatically they’re distracting us.

Not long ago, as happens almost every day, I got a Skype call on my smartphone from my dad, who lives in Kolkata, India. My dad is 79 and doesn’t get out very much, having become increasingly housebound. On this day, I was traveling by train from Denmark to Sweden. Speaking to him, I held my phone up against the window, its camera lens facing out. We both took in the view of the Swedish countryside as the train pulled out from Malmo and sped toward Lund. For a brief while, it felt like we were traveling together.

For that moment of connection, and many others like it, my phone deserves my gratitude. But the same device has become a source of relentless distraction in my life, intruding upon my attention with frightening regularity and diminishing my in-person interactions with family and friends. On a visit to Kolkata to see my dad, I found myself reaching for my phone every few minutes in the middle of our conversation to scan my Facebook feed and see if a photo I’d recently posted had garnered any fresh likes. (It had! And comments, too!)

Over the past decade, smartphones have revolutionized our lives in ways that go well beyond how we communicate. Besides calling, texting, and emailing, more than two billion people around the world now use these devices to navigate, to book cab rides, to compare product reviews and prices, to follow the news, to watch movies, to listen to music, to play video games, to memorialize vacations, and, not least of all, to participate in social media.

It’s incontrovertible that smartphone technology has yielded many benefits for society, such as allowing millions of people who lack access to banks to conduct financial transactions, for instance, or enabling rescue workers in a disaster zone to pinpoint precisely where their help is needed most urgently. There are apps available for smartphone users to monitor how much they’re walking during the day and how well they’re sleeping at night. New applications of the technology emerge seemingly daily: Your smartphone can now help you stay on top of your children’s dental hygiene by tracking how long they’re brushing their teeth with their Bluetooth-enabled toothbrushes. (My wife and I decided that this was a bit much.)

These benefits, however, seem to have come at a high cost to our mental and social lives. The constant connectivity and access to information that smartphones offer have made the devices something of a drug for hundreds of millions of users. Scientists are just beginning to research this phenomenon, but their studies suggest that we are becomingly increasingly distracted, spending less time in the real world and being drawn more deeply into the virtual world.

The power they hold over us is glaringly evident in our everyday habits and behaviors. Remembering directions is a thing of the past—we habitually rely on our phones to get anywhere, even to destinations we’ve visited numerous times before. The most compulsive users among us keep our phones within clutching distance at all times, reaching for them even when we wake up in the middle of the night. At airports, on college campuses, at the mall, at the stoplight—at almost any public place you can think of—the most common sight of our time is that of people with bowed heads, looking intently at their phones. If you see someone in a café sipping coffee and staring out the window, it’s less likely that they’re enjoying a quiet moment and more likely that their device has simply run out of charge.

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Our use of smartphones has effectively changed the geography of our minds, creating a distractive off-ramp for every thought we might have on our own. “What I’ve seen in the last six to eight years is a massive paradigm shift—much of the attentional resource that we devoted to our personal ecosystem has been shifted to what’s virtual,” says Larry Rosen, an emeritus professor of psychology at California State University in Dominguez Hills and co-author of The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a Hi-Tech World. “That means you are not attending to what’s in front of you. We see this in parenting—you are not focusing on your kids. You’re not even focusing on what you’re watching on television because you’re second-screening. It’s affecting every aspect of our lives, and sadly, I don’t think the pendulum has swung as far as it will go.”

Researchers have begun documenting the impact of smartphones on our ability to focus. In one study, Adrian Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, and his colleagues gave 800 participants two challenging mental tasks—solving a math problem while memorizing a random sequence of letters and selecting an image out of a few options to complete a visual pattern. Some participants were asked to leave their smartphones in another room while others were allowed to keep their smartphones in their pockets. Still other participants kept their smartphones on a desk in front of them. Although the phones played no role in the tasks, how accessible the phones were had an effect on how well the participants were able to perform them. Those who had left their phones in another room fared the best. Those with the phones placed in front of them did the worst. But even those who had tucked their phones in their pockets were found to have diminished cognitive capacity.

Researchers worry that addiction to smartphones could dull the ability of young users to read and comprehend texts, which in turn could have adverse impacts on their critical thinking. These concerns are based on the results of studies such as one conducted by psychologist Anne Mangen and her colleagues at the University of Stavanger in Norway. They divided 72 students in the 10th grade into two groups, asking one group to read two texts on paper and the other to read the same texts as PDFs on a screen. The print readers did much better on a reading comprehension test than the digital readers.

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Another study, conducted at the University of British Columbia, lends support to what many of us have concluded from first-hand experience: Smartphone use can adversely affect social interactions in the real world. The researchers, led by Ryan Dwyer, a doctoral student in psychology, asked more than 300 participants to have a meal at a restaurant with friends or family, instructing some to keep their phones on the table and others to put their phones away. Those who had their phones in front of them reported feeling more distracted during the conversation and enjoyed the meal less than the others.

“When people had access to their phones, they were also more bored, which is not what we were expecting,” Dwyer says. Having your phone on the table while dining, he adds, is “probably not going to ruin your meal, but it could chip away at your enjoyment.” The toll exacted by this phenomenon on close family relationships is easy to extrapolate.

The reason why it’s become so hard for us to set aside our phones, even at mealtimes, isn’t hard to understand. “It’s well known that if you want to keep a person dialed into something, give them a reward at variable times,” explains Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Turns out, that’s exactly what email or social media does—you don’t know when you’ll get another like or receive your next email, and so we keep checking.”

Our compulsivity seems to be getting worse, according to a study by Rosen and his colleagues in which they’ve been keeping track of smartphone use by high school students and young adults. Using apps that count the number of times a phone gets unlocked, the researchers found that participants had gone from unlocking their phones about 56 times a day in 2016 to 73 times a day in 2018. “That’s a huge increase,” Rosen says.

Some of the blame lies with notifications, which can be turned off. Another factor is “the anxieties that are in your head,” Rosen says, and these too can be addressed with efforts like mindfulness and meditation. A third and more insidious factor, according to Rosen, is the way technology companies have “carefully orchestrated their apps and their websites to get your eyeballs there, to keep them there and to keep them coming back.”

Responding to these criticisms, phone makers have developed apps to help users monitor their phone screen time. But it’s unclear if apps like Apple’s Screen Time and Google Android’s Digital Well Being will help users curtail the time they spend on their phones. In a study of high school seniors, Rosen and his team found that the study participants did check screen time monitoring apps occasionally and did learn that they’d been spending more time on their phones than they’d thought. But they determined that about half of them made no changes to their behavior. (The researchers are following up to find out what changes the others made.)

Rosen admits to being hooked himself. As a news junkie, he’s constantly opening up Apple News on his phone. “Most of the time, there’s nothing new, but every once in a while, a new story shows up, giving me a positive reinforcement to do it more often,” he says.

Learning to live with the technology without surrendering to it may be one of the biggest challenges we face in the digital era. “We are playing catch-up,” says Kross, who describes the experiential universe opened up by smartphones as a new ecosystem that we’re still adapting to. “There are helpful or harmful ways of navigating the offline world, and the same is true of the digital world.”

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Smartphones: the cultural, individual and technical processes that make them smart

Professor of Material Culture, UCL

Disclosure statement

Daniel Miller receives funding from The European Research Council.

University College London provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK.

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Has there ever been an invention so integral to our lives, and so intimate, as the smartphone? Yet they are slippery things. Smartphones are both a step change in the ability of human beings to communicate with each other and become informed, and a new point of vulnerability to penetration by the outside world. They are at once talismans of our freedom and connectivity and tokens of the corporations who collect our data and impinge on our privacy.

I’m an anthropologist, and I’m part of a team currently researching these issues. We’re trying to answer a very simple question: what is a smartphone? It may seem odd that a group of academics who specialise in the study of social relations should attempt this, but we are perhaps the only type of experts who can answer this question.

Why? Well, Apple makes the iPhone, Samsung the Galaxy; these are phones with the capacity to be smart. But what really makes them smart comes from below: from their appropriation by users. Very few people, if any, restrict themselves to the apps that come with their phone. Instead, each person creates a new configuration from additional apps and changed settings. AI and algorithms in turn facilitate the phone’s ability to learn from their specific individual usage. To know what the smartphone is requires observing how it has come into being through these processes.

We are taking a global perspective on the smartphone, investigating what kind of phone people create in places in Brazil, Cameroon, Chile, China, Ireland, Italy, Japan, East Jerusalem and Uganda. Our focus is on people at mid-life. We also study how the capacities created by smartphones might mitigate the loss of capacity associated with ill-health and observe how phones take on cultural as well as personal values.

To understand the smartphone, an analogy with the daemon in Philip Pullman ’s Northern Lights novels may help. In the Northern Lights world, human beings have an animal avatar that can change in youth, but then settles into the species best reflecting their adult self: augmenting an aspect of their personality or profession. In Pullman’s latest novel, La Belle Sauvage , for example, the daemon Asta can become an owl in order to see better in the dark. The daemon is external yet integral. Even being a distance from one’s daemon can create a painful wrench.

Similarly, we have a relationship to, as well as through, our phones, to others and back to ourselves. Our anxiety about a phone accidentally left at home may not just be the absence of a machine, but a temporary loss of part of ourselves.

Phone daemons

I’m carrying out my own part of the project in Ireland, where I have been observing how each phone becomes that particular person’s daemon. A retired fisherman’s phone, for example, expresses rugged and practical self-sufficiency – all usage must be justified by strict canons of function. Now his daughter is no longer in Australia, for example, Skype is seen as superfluous.

The iPhone of a 69-year-old professional woman, meanwhile, is a marvel. All her apps are in nested folders labelled finance, sports, news, and utilities. Each task, such as paying a utility bill, is scheduled in her calendar, which links to files on her notebook outlining each step of the procedure, relevant passwords and websites. Her phone has become a life manual of several hundred pages.

Then there is the phone dominated by seven apps all related to the owner’s passion for sailing. Or the caring phone devoted to helping a woman look after her 90-year-old mother with dementia; mobilising family care through WhatsApp, showing pictures of grandchildren through Facebook, using maps to reach a hospital appointment.

Typically, these people actively employ 25 to 30 different functions to craft their specific phones. Personalisation may involve downloading apps, but far more important is the adaptation of platforms such as WhatsApp and calendar. In this way, the phone becomes an avatar or daemon of that user.

Anthropomorphic machines

For more than a century, humanity has been fascinated by the development of the robot and its potential to realise our imagination of the anthropomorphic machine – that is, machines that look like or have the qualities of a human being. The robot is conceived to be a machine that becomes increasingly similar to us while remaining other. But the smartphone represents a more profound and advanced trajectory towards the anthropomorphic machine – one that proceeds through increasing intimacy.

Our concerns about robots have traditionally focused upon their appearance. We feel ambivalence about something that looks like us. By contrast, a smartphone looks not one iota like a human being. It has no arms and no legs. Instead, it achieves mobility through placement in trouser pockets or handbags. Anthropomorphism is advanced through these more prosthetic processes, the way the phone extends us, as well as its ability to transform the individual it belongs to.

The increasing intimacy of phones can also cause many problems. Those relating to the loss of privacy and control by corporations are familiar. Teaching phone usage to older people reveals the stupidity of phones. When asked to download an app, my students press an icon called downloads. They assume Google Play is for games. When asked to go on the internet, they don’t know if this means Samsung internet, Chrome, OK Google, or one called Internet. The young tell older people that smartphones are intuitive. They are quite wrong about that.

Both these problems and the new capacities vary by region. Older people in Shanghai embrace the phone’s modernity and in a restaurant they may be the ones engrossed in their phones, while the young people chat directly to each other. In Japan, a country where people may hold funerals for material things , there was already a tradition of the daemon-like quality of objects and their intimacy that give these processes a distinct meaning.

To have an informed discussion about the use and consequences of smartphones we first need to know what they are, through examining the cultural and individual, as well as the technical, processes that make them smart.

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Essay on Impact of Smartphones on Students

Students are often asked to write an essay on Impact of Smartphones on Students in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Impact of Smartphones on Students

The rise of smartphones.

Smartphones have become a significant part of our lives, especially for students. They offer numerous benefits, like easy communication and access to vast information.

Learning Tools

Smartphones serve as learning tools. They provide educational apps that help students understand complex concepts.

Distractions and Stress

However, smartphones can also distract students from their studies. Excessive use can lead to stress and affect their mental health.

While smartphones offer many advantages, it’s crucial for students to use them wisely, balancing their benefits and drawbacks.

250 Words Essay on Impact of Smartphones on Students

Introduction.

Smartphones, a ubiquitous symbol of the 21st century, have become an integral part of our lives, especially for students. The impact of smartphones on students is a multifaceted topic, with both positive and negative implications.

Positive Impact

Smartphones have revolutionized the learning process, providing students with a wealth of information at their fingertips. They serve as portable libraries, allowing students to access e-books, educational apps, and online courses. This has democratized education, making it accessible to students irrespective of their geographical location.

Negative Impact

However, the impact is not entirely positive. Excessive smartphone usage can lead to addiction, negatively affecting a student’s physical and mental health. It often results in reduced concentration, sleep deprivation, and poor academic performance. Moreover, it exposes students to cyber threats and inappropriate content.

In conclusion, while smartphones have transformed the educational landscape, their misuse can have detrimental effects. It is crucial for students to use this tool judiciously, balancing its benefits with potential risks. The onus also lies on educational institutions and parents to guide students in responsible smartphone usage.

500 Words Essay on Impact of Smartphones on Students

The advent of smartphones has brought about a significant transformation in the way we live and interact. These handheld devices have particularly impacted the lives of students, offering both opportunities and challenges. This essay examines the impact of smartphones on students, focusing on their academic performance, social interaction, and mental health.

Academic Performance

Smartphones can be a double-edged sword when it comes to academic performance. On one hand, they provide access to a plethora of educational resources. Students can download educational apps, watch instructional videos, and participate in interactive quizzes, thereby enhancing their learning experience. Moreover, smartphones allow students to keep track of their schedules, set reminders for assignments, and collaborate with classmates, promoting organization and efficiency.

However, the misuse of smartphones can hamper academic performance. The convenience of internet access can lead to distractions and procrastination. Excessive time spent on non-academic activities, such as social media or games, can detract from study time, leading to poor academic outcomes.

Social Interaction

Smartphones have significantly influenced the way students socialize. They enable instant communication and connection with peers, regardless of geographical distance. Social media platforms, accessible through smartphones, allow students to share experiences, ideas, and opinions, fostering a sense of community.

Yet, this digital interaction can sometimes replace face-to-face communication, leading to a decrease in physical social interaction. This shift can impact social skills and emotional intelligence, as digital communication often lacks the non-verbal cues integral to understanding and empathy.

Mental Health

The impact of smartphones on students’ mental health is a growing area of concern. The constant connectivity can lead to an ‘always-on’ mentality, causing stress and anxiety. Additionally, the prevalence of cyberbullying and the pressure to maintain an idealized online persona can negatively impact self-esteem and mental well-being.

On the positive side, smartphones can provide access to mental health resources. Numerous apps offer mindfulness exercises, mental health education, and even therapy options. For some students, these resources can serve as a lifeline, providing support and guidance.

In conclusion, smartphones have a profound impact on students, influencing their academic performance, social interaction, and mental health. While they offer numerous benefits, such as access to educational resources and mental health support, they also pose challenges, including distraction, reduced face-to-face interaction, and potential mental health issues. It is crucial for students to learn to use these devices responsibly, balancing their benefits against the potential risks, to ensure that smartphones serve as tools for enhancement, rather than detriment, to their overall well-being.

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Social Issues: Smartphones’ Positive Impacts Essay

There are many people who are not happy with the current popularity of smartphones. They believe that it hurts young people. They also believe that many are guilty of inappropriate use of smartphones, such as texting while driving and using it during dinnertime (Archer 1).

Although users need to learn how to appropriately use smartphones, it can be argued that smartphones have created a positive impact on society. Some people are guilty of the inappropriate use of smartphones. However, smartphones make it easier to conduct business, prepare travel plans, communicate with important people, gather important information, and locate a particular address.

According to one commentary, “Anything can be abused, even the smartphone” (Archer 1). It means that people use smartphones in an appropriate manner. Nevertheless, one of the most important contributions of smartphones is the convenience of communicating with important people (Turkle 53). In the past, one has to use pay phones to make a call. Most of the time it is difficult to access pay phones.

Sometimes the user does not have enough money to use a pay phone. In other instances, pay phones are defective; therefore, it is impossible to make a call. A smartphone, on the other hand, allows the user to make calls to important people anytime he or she wants to contact them. It is very convenient to make a call using a smartphone because it is a portable device.

The user can carry a smartphone in public places and other locations where there are no pay phones. Smartphones also allow them to send instant messages, and it is a cheap way to communicate with others. Smartphones also allow people to organize the messages that they receive, and it helps them become more productive.

Consider the following quote, “According to another poll by SecurEnvoy, 70 percent of women have phone separation anxiety as opposed to 61 percent of men” (Archer 1). It means that a significant number of people must learn how to live without a smartphone. However, it is also true that the second most important contribution of smartphones can be seen in how it helps people conduct business with each other. In the past, business people need to meet.

They need a face-to-face interaction to close a deal. In the present time, the smartphone enables business people to talk to each other using a camera. The camera enables them to talk as if they are interacting face-to-face. Aside from the convenience of using the phone’s camera to see the other person’s facial reaction, the smartphone also allows them to send business documents with ease. They can also carry the electronic copy of the business documents with them using their smartphone.

They can edit the business documents even if they are on a taxi or in a public place. As a result, they can perform necessary tasks, even when they do not have a personal computer with them. In the past, businesspeople are stressed out if they discover an error in their PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheets.

In the past, they have to go back to their office, or they need to carry a laptop with them. It is oftentimes difficult to make the correction in cramped places like inside the car or inside an airplane. However, it is easier to manipulate a handheld device like a smartphone.

The third most important contribution of the smartphone is the convenience it provides when it comes to gathering important information. Students are able to perform research while they are waiting for their parents to pick them up. They are able to complete their research requirements at a faster rate because they can do research even if the do not have access to a personal computer.

Aside from students, adults benefit from the smartphone’s wireless capability to access information. If they need specific information in order to finish a certain task, there is no need to go to the library or access a personal computer. It is therefore convenient to gather information using a handheld device.

Due to inappropriate use of smartphones, observers were quoted as saying, “As our culture becomes ever more tech savvy and tech hungry, phone-free zones will become more and more common” (Archer 1). It means that policymakers will have to create laws to ban the use of smartphones in some areas. However, it is also true that the fourth most important contribution of smartphones is in the convenience it provides when it comes to travel plans (Timmerman & Rasouli 29).

Those who missed their flights or encountered an emergency may have to stay overnight in a particular location. If they were not able to make reservations ahead of time they will have a hard time finding a hotel that will suit their needs. It is also difficult to make decisions while still in the airport. However, a smartphone can help them locate the hotel that they can afford. Even if there is no emergency, a smartphone can help travelers experience a hassle-free vacation.

They can use their smartphones to discover cheap hotels or cheap restaurants that provide quality service to their customers. In the past, people need to use the telephone book. They also need establishments in order to find out about their products and services. In the present time, users can download a specific computer application in order to help them select the best hotel in a given area.

In other words, there is no need to physically go to a hotel straight from the airport. There is no need to enter a hotel establishment and ask the receptionist about available rooms. There is no need to ask them about room rates because the information is displayed on the smartphone.

The fifth most important contribution of smartphones is the convenience it provides when it comes to locating a particular address. In the past, locating an establishment or an office building requires walking long distances. In most cases, the one looking for the establishment has only the address and nothing more. However, a smartphone that is equipped with the necessary computer application can provide a map that the user can utilize to search for the said address.

Using the said computer application, the user can figure out how far he is from the establishment that he needs to locate. In other words, it is easier to look for something if there is a reference point that can be used to determine the distance from one building to the next. Aside from the maps, it is easier to locate an address using a smartphone, because in most cases one can access the image or picture of the said building or establishment.

The inappropriate use of smartphones is the reason why it has a bad reputation. It is easy to understand the criticism about the use of smartphones while driving. It is also inappropriate to use smartphones while eating dinner. However, smartphones provide a convenient way to communicate with people, conduct business with people, arrange travel plans, gather important information, and locate a specific address.

In the past, it is expensive to make calls. In the past, it is not convenient to make calls using payphones. In the past, it is difficult to solve problems regarding business documents, and it is difficult to solve problems related to travel needs. These problems are resolved by having access to a smartphone. Using the correct computer applications, users can locate the best hotel that will suit their needs. A smartphone can also help them locate a specific address without the need to walk long distances.

Works Cited

Archer, Dale. Smartphone Addiction . Psychology Today. 2013. Web.

Timmersman, Harry & Soora Rasouli. Mobile Technologies for Activity-Travel Data Collection and Analysis . PA: IGI Global, 2014. Print.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other . New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print.

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Smartphone Essay

500 words essay on smartphone.

Smartphones have become a very important form of communication these days. It is impossible for a rational person to deny the advantages of smartphones as they are devices suitable for a wide variety of tasks. Let us try to understand smartphones along with their benefits with this smartphone essay.

                                                                                                                                    Smartphone Essay

Understanding the Smartphone

A smartphone is a mobile device that facilitates the combination of cellular and mobile computing functions into one single unit. Moreover, smartphones have stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems in comparison to feature phones.

The strong operating systems of smartphones make possible multimedia functionality, wider software, and the internet including web browsing. They also support core phone functions like text messaging and voice calls.

There are a number of metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) integrated circuit (IC) chips within a smartphone. Moreover, such chips include various sensors whose leveraging is possible by their software.

The marketing of early smartphones was primarily towards the enterprise market. Furthermore, the attempt of the smartphone manufacturers was to bridge the functionality of standalone personal digital assistant (PDA) devices along with support for cellular telephony. However, the early smartphones had problems of slow analogue cellular network, short battery life, and bulky size.

With the passage of time, experts were able to resolve these issues. Furthermore, this became possible with faster digital mobile data networks, miniaturization of MOS transistors down to sub-micron levels, and exponential scaling. Moreover, the development of more mature software platforms led to enhancement in the capability of smartphones.

Benefits of Smartphone

People can make use of smartphones to access the internet and find out information regarding almost anything. Furthermore, due to the portability of a smartphone, people can access the internet from any location, even while travelling.

Smartphones have greatly increased the rate of work. This is possible because smartphones facilitate a highly efficient and quick form of communication from anywhere. For example, a person can participate in an official business meeting, without wasting time, from the comfort of his home via a live video chat application of a smartphone.

Smartphones can also be of tremendous benefit to students in general. Furthermore, students can quickly resolve any issue related to studies by accessing the internet , using a calculator, reading a pdf file, or contacting a teacher. Most noteworthy, all of this is possible due to the smartphone.

People can get in touch with the larger global community by communicating and sharing their views via social media. Furthermore, this provides a suitable platform to express their views, conduct business with online transactions , or find new people or jobs. One can do all that from anywhere, thanks to the smartphone.

These were just a few benefits of smartphones. Overall, the total benefits of a smartphone are just too many to enumerate here. Most importantly, smartphones have made our lives more efficient as well as comfortable.

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Conclusion of Smartphone Essay

Smartphones have proven to be a revolution for human society. Furthermore, they have made the whole world united like never before. In spite of its demerits, there is no doubt that the smartphone is a tremendous blessing to mankind and it will continue to play a major role in its development.

FAQs For Smartphone Essay

Question 1: How is a smartphone different from a feature phone?

Answer 1: Smartphones have stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems when compared to feature phones. Furthermore, the smartphone can perform almost all computing functions that a feature phone can’t. The internet and camera capabilities of a feature phone are nowhere near as powerful as that of a smartphone.

Question 2: What is meant by a smartphone?

Answer 2: A smartphone refers to a handheld electronic device that facilitates a connection to a cellular network. Furthermore, smartphones let people access the internet, make phone calls, send text messages, along with a wide variety of functions that one can perform on a pc or a laptop. Overall, it is a fully functioning miniaturized computer.

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Essay on Positive Impacts of Smartphone Technology on Learning

We live in the age of digital technologies in the globalized world today. Each part of our everyday life has its connection with technology. When opposed to old times, we have better services and much better luxuries with the aid of increasing technologies. Technological growth is not limited to any industry, and emerging innovations are developed for all industries and sectors of society according to their needs and demands. Technology is applied to each person’s lifetime tasks. Every day, we use technologies to perform particular activities or interests. Modern technology enhances human capacity, which has grown over the years. What used to work, could not work today, must be old or replaced by new technologies. We can chat with friends and family living far from us using mobile technology. Therefore, this paper will argue on how smartphones positively impact learning.

In 1993, the smartphone era started with Simon’s IBM smartphone (Sarwar, 2013). The smartphone movement began with the arrival in the mass media industry of blackberry smartphones with several features, including web searching, camera, email, and internet. Apple joined the industry in 2007 when the first smartphone was launched, and it was an important development in the market. In order to approach mobile consumers using cutting-edge technologies, the Android operating system by Google was unveiled in public before the end of 2007.

A smartphone is a handheld device with a computer’s capability. This computer gives users advanced networking and processing capacities than conventional cell telephones with internet connectivity, high-quality cameras, and management equipment (Boulos, 2011). The latest phones are seen instead of a standard phone because of their strong processing capacities and amazing memories as portable computers. The ability to use functional software on smartphones has made smartphones an ever more powerful gadget that replaces several gadgets, including alarm clocks, computers, notebooks, GPS navigators, and digital cameras.

Over recent decades, higher education and learning have adopted ICT, which is seen as a vital component for adapting to social environment growth (Rung, 2014). The most popular trend in using ICTs is that mobile devices are dependent since they are not restricted to everyday activities but are still used in education environments. Access to course material, inspirational communication and dialogue between teachers and students, and information on students’ success are educational events that include mobile use (Cochrane, 2010). Thus, mobile use will have a significant effect on students’ success as this technology can enhance education and learning.

It is reported that different areas of student life will change as students start using smartphones to expand their academic skills (Woodcock, 2012). Smartphones will also help students to become conscious of the advantages of studying anywhere, every time, and at any time and inspire students to engage in learning practices. This indicates that technology will open up and enhance student prospects, in particular in its academic field.

A self-report study was carried out on students’ mobile telephony practices in classrooms and student success effects (Froese, 2012). The result shows that mobile telephone usage distracts students from studying, and their classroom learning is interrupted when learning code.

Smartphone learning is more successful because it improves the success of the student in the academic field. The use of smartphones is formal and casual since both teachers and students interact in classrooms and outside. As students visit Google, they immediately read the references they have discovered. In this case, it immediately improved their awareness. They instinctively know the details without wanting to know it. It has been shown that the use of smartphones often strengthens students’ skills and helps them focus more on academics. Students who use their smartphones correctly will influence their selves, parents, professors, and schools positively. The use of mobile phones inspires students. Since they get plenty of information with the use of search engines such as Google, they boost their ability to look for information using different applications on smartphones.

Students are inspired by the advantages of using smartphones as resources for students. They don’t just concentrate on classroom research but have the experience where and how they need it. Studies that make students relaxed and happier in their studies in another setting. In addition, students discussed the use of smartphones as education platforms more effectively by using the different applications on their smartphones. Some people use their smartphones for training purposes (Soyemi Jumoke, 2015). For instance, they use the calculator to measure something and set a date reminder such as analysis or testing. Some users use the mobile to enhance their academic abilities by downloading the program on the educational smartphone. For example, to better their knowledge, users download the dictionary application. Another example is that people download Ginger to enhance their grammar skills. So you can use your mobile applications here to enhance your skills.

Modern technological changes influence the way schools study. Consequently, smartphone use is the perfect option for future research in the school community (Issham Ismail, 2015). The use of smartphones enables the student to compete effectively in the university. The smartphones appeal to (Issham Ismail, 2015)), says that it will allow the use of learning resources for the future. The use of smartphones as learning instruments expanded parental participation in children’s schooling, and the schools’ websites already have parents checking their children’s exams.

Students have increased their trust in the efficiency of smartphones. When students are afraid to ask the teachers, they can ask the teacher by message or dial the educators. Long-distance students use mobile as their tool for receiving teachers’ and colleague’s information or news (Tim Vorley, 2016). For instance, at University London, Malaysian students can only use their smartphones to communicate with teachers. You can use Skype, except in the simulated version. They both are more straightforward because they can still reach one another behind the obstacles of gaps. There’s no cause for research and the use of mobile new knowledge. (Tim Vorley, 2016), however, it says that the library content is accessed via smartphones. Art students use smartphones to help them search through the library system for content. It has also been named smartphone applications. The studies for smartphones often name them mobile learning since users can learn anything by using smartphones.

The learning environment changes as technology comes. Students have more choices than ever before. In ancient times, people just learned in school. But nowadays, people require only a WIFI and a screen. You read, at home or in the coffee shop when it is best for you. The role of the teacher changes with the talents, knowledge, and needs of the student. Technology has changed how people learn. Innovations have changed learning from a quasi-individual effort to collaboration. Google Drive, Dropbox, and Evernote are ready to collaborate with typical task management applications, such as Astrid and Todoist. Technology has become an enabler that gives the pupil a humanized learning environment rather than an obstacle to genuine contact. It promotes cognitive and socio-emotional processes by engaging students to “see one another,” Zain Verjee writes.

Technology should be an instrument for constructive learning rather than passive learning. Learners, not just spectators, will be writers or problem solvers. The web provides them with the freedom to learn following their own choices. The more people used technology, the better the learning, says the scientist—students who use mobile apps to learn anywhere and be the most popular. The most vital teachers are the involved teachers who have a sense of power over their classes. The students can use the internet to view and resolve issues directly.

In conclusion, this paper reveals that smartphones influence the university life of students in many ways. There have been arguments about and for the effect of smartphones on student academic success. This research should end with the fact that smartphones have a more positive than negative effect on students.

Boulos, M. N. (2011). How smartphones are changing the face of mobile and participatory health care; an overview, with example from eCAALYX.  Biomed Eng Online, , 24.

Cochrane, T. D. (2010). Beyond the Yellow Brick Road: mobile Web 2.0 informing a new institutional e‐learning strategy. 221-231. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/09687769.2010.529110.

Froese, A. D. (2012). Effects of classroom cell phone use on expected and actual learning.  College Student Journal, , 323-332.

Issham Ismail, S. N. (2015). Mobile Phone as Pedagogical Tools: Are Teachers Ready?  International Education Studies, , 36-47.

Rung, A. W. (2014). Investigating the Use of Smartphones for Learning Purposes by Australian Dental Students.  JMIR Mhealth . Retrieved from http://mhealth.jmir.org/2014/2/e20/

Sarwar, M. &. (2013). mpact of Smartphone’s on Society. .  European Journal of Scientific Research,  , 216-226.

Soyemi Jumoke, O. S. (2015). Analysis of mobile phone impact on student academic performance in Tertiary Institution.  International Journal of Emerging Technology and Advanced Engineering, , 361-367.

Tim Vorley, N. W. (2016). Not just dialling it in.  . Education + Training, , 45-60.

Woodcock, B. M. (2012). Considering the Smartphone Lerner: An investigation into student interest in the use of personal technology to enchance their learning. .  Student Engagement and Experience Journal, 1-15.

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The Positive Impact of Smartphones - Essay Sample

In todays world, smartphones play a crucial role in peoples lives. They have made their lives much comfortable and easier. Technology is solely responsible for incorporating comfort into human beings day-to-day life. It has changed their approach to things while at the same time improving the standards of living. Technology has undergone a lot of expansion in various areas including smartphones, which are communication gadgets offering excellent functionality and usage to individuals. This essay looks at the positive impact of smartphones on the society.

There is no denying that, as smartphones improve, peoples lives become much easier. Nowadays, these devices facilitate ease of communication, enable people learn new things, contain applications that make life easier, and even develop businesses. Sending a message on social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter are instances of how smartphones help people communicate and stay in touch. When it comes to finding out new things, they make it quite easy to get answers to any questions anywhere and anytime. All a person has to do is use it to access the internet and type a keyword on a search engine. In addition, there are numerous smartphone applications that make users lives easier, such as those with maps and which indicate weather patterns. Also, the ability to send and receive emails via cellphones is an indicator of how they can take care of and develop business (Page, 39).

Smartphones are a crucial tool for consumers as they allow users to access commerce related information, look for discounts, and buy products. According to Page (42), M-commerce is undergoing rapid growth and is expected to expand even further in the future. Also, mobile marketing with the use of cellphones allow entrepreneurs to engage with potential customers in new ways. Such a situation is particularly favorable for small businesses as it presents them with a cost effective way of getting in touch with new audiences.

The instant messaging and text functions of smartphones can be used to assist people suffering from vocal communication issues. Certain conditions, like diseases of the vocal cords and some forms of autism, make patients be unable to vocalize words despite having the ability to understand them. Smartphones present them with an unobtrusive and portable way of typing what they wish to say rather than having to speak it loudly. Some devices even have text-to-speech (Bort-Roig, 673).

Today, smartphones have made it much easier than before for people to stay in contact with family members and friends, particularly for those who travel a lot. Cellphone-based services such as instant messaging and SMS encourage communication between users merely by their convenience, allowing them to remain more or less in constant contact. In addition, being in possession of a smartphone allows an individual to make emergency calls immediately without having to waste time searching for a landline telephone to call from. According to Bort-Roig (681), authorities are aware that most 911 calls are made from cellphones, thus recognizing them as a vital tool for public safety. There is even a text-to-911 feature that enables users to request emergency help through texting under certain circumstances. Even in cases of non-emergencies such as a vehicle breakdown, smartphones make asking for help a lot easier and safer. Old fashioned cellphones are capable of making calls and sending text messaging. As much as this can pass the message across, smartphones offer better and more advanced means of communicating. In addition to calling and texting, they give the user access to video calling and conferencing as well as email. A person can also remain connected via social media. Another top feature of smartphones is their access to the internet. Initially, web browsing was restricted to a desk within an office setting where a wire could reach a computer. Laptops and wireless access made the web to be accessed from pretty much anywhere in an office or home. However, it is smartphone technology such as wireless broadband that has totally expanded access to the worldwide web. In addition, the latest smartphones are capable of displaying almost as much of the internet as personal computers, such as streaming high definition video clips and games.

With a smartphone, it is possible to merge several electronic devices into one. In the past, an individual had to carry around a number of devices required for day-to-day business activities. They included a cellphone, PDA, MP3 player, GPS device, a camera and an e-book reader. A decent smartphone is capable of combining all those functionalities into it. The cellphone-sized has miniaturized hardware that contains a processor, camera, speakers, Wi-Fi adapter, GPS receiver, and touch-sensitive screen. While the late twentieth century witnessed a mushrooming of computer applications, the subsequent one brought with it a litany of smartphone apps. The device has built-in sensors, is programmable as well as portable; characteristics that make it possess virtually unlimited applications. In addition to the many productivity apps and games available, there are fitness and health apps that track the distance run by consumers, calories consumed, and even the current heart beat rate. Podcast and online radio apps connect people with a whole new world of audio streaming. Leveling, flashlight and compass apps offer handheld utilities. Applications that allow the user to create music, modify pictures or paint boost peoples creativity.

Considering that millions of people currently own smartphones, businesses consider them crucial in their communication systems. This is particularly the case for small to medium-sized (SMBs) and start-up businesses, with more and more of them integrating the devices in their day-to-day operations. Smartphones facilitate smooth communication even in far-flung and remote areas. Any entrepreneur is aware that business can take place anywhere; meaning that transactions and deals can be conducted outside of an office setting. Hence, it is important to be in possession of something that can enable smooth communication with business partners, employees, and potential customers.

Nowadays, business is turning out to be more and more mobile; thus necessitating the adoption of smartphones into the communication system. With these devices, an entrepreneur can easily carry out communication actions such as making and getting calls, sending and receiving online tax, recording and listening to voicemails, and many more. If a person is taking part in a business meeting far from the premises, he or she can conveniently ask a worker to send documents like financial statements via a smartphone. There is no need to go looking for an internet cafe in order to access ones mail.

Another positive use of smartphones is in storing important files. Modern devices have enormous memory capacities. Entrepreneurs can easily store documents and files in them, especially those that of great importance to the business. In addition, files such as music and photographs can be stores as soon as they are shared or downloaded. By having storage capacity for files in a smartphone, a person can easily share or send files whenever necessary.

Works Cited

Bort-Roig, Judit, et al. "Measuring and influencing physical activity with smartphone technology: a systematic review." Sports Medicine 44.5 (2014): 671-686.

Page, Tom. "Smartphone technology, consumer attachment and mass customisation." International Journal of Green Computing (IJGC) 4.2 (2013): 38-57.

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End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

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S omething went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics : Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand , the Nordic countries , and beyond . By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less , having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens , and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May , OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound , but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction . Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now

Related Podcast

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play .

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults .

From the April 2014 issue: The overprotected kid

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital ––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions–– exacerbated parental fears . Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting . In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

But overprotection is only part of the story. The transition away from a more independent childhood was facilitated by steady improvements in digital technology, which made it easier and more inviting for young people to spend a lot more time at home, indoors, and alone in their rooms. Eventually, tech companies got access to children 24/7. They developed exciting virtual activities, engineered for “engagement,” that are nothing like the real-world experiences young brains evolved to expect.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007 )—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent , and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns , even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average . The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

These very high numbers do not include time spent in front of screens for school or homework, nor do they include all the time adolescents spend paying only partial attention to events in the real world while thinking about what they’re missing on social media or waiting for their phones to ping. Pew reports that in 2022, one-third of teens said they were on one of the major social-media sites “almost constantly,” and nearly half said the same of the internet in general. For these heavy users, nearly every waking hour is an hour absorbed, in full or in part, by their devices.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s , and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media . Exercise declined , too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010 s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

Read: What happens when kids don’t see their peers for months

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied , meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous ; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication , or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit , so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly— one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer . This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “ Internet gaming disorder ,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why v ideos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today.

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that , from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind , writes ,

The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier.

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

How can it be that an entire generation is hooked on consumer products that so few praise and so many ultimately regret using? Because smartphones and especially social media have put members of Gen Z and their parents into a series of collective-action traps. Once you understand the dynamics of these traps, the escape routes become clear.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

From the May 2022 issue: Jonathan Haidt on why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem . It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study , these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up .

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

Read: Why Congress keeps failing to protect kids online

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org , suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Even without the help of organizations, parents could break their families out of collective-action traps if they coordinated with the parents of their children’s friends. Together they could create common smartphone rules and organize unsupervised play sessions or encourage hangouts at a home, park, or shopping mall.

P arents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness .

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Smartphone — The Negative Impacts of Smartphones

The Negative Impacts of Smartphones

• Categories: Smartphone

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Words: 951 |

Published: Aug 14, 2018

Words: 951 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Works Cited

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• Ting, D. H., Lim, H., Patanmacia, D., Low, G. S., & Ker, A. P. (2011). Determinants of smartphone adoption by young adults: A comparison of male and female users. Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness, 5(1), 134-144.
• Imtiaz, N., Arif, A. A., & Wajeeha, A. (2014). Impact of smartphones on social interaction and relationships. Journal of Media and Communication Studies, 6(3), 39-46.
• MPRA (Munich Personal RePEc Archive). (2014). Impact of 3G and 4G on smartphone market and consumer exploitation: A study in Lahore, Pakistan. Retrieved from https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/60270/
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• Lemerre, J. (2015). The impact of smartphone use on students' academic performance: Evidence from a French university. International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, 7(1), 77-92.
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