I saw something interesting today and it’s right up Good Enough Mother’s alley (you’ve been there before, right?). A Time Mobility Poll on society and cell phones shows that the VAST majority of us are addicted to our smart phones, with a whopping 84 % saying they could not go a whole day without theirs. Whoa.
Full disclosure: I am a card carrying member of that 84%; obviously my job necessitates that I be plugged in and on for much of the day. But even before I was building the GEMpire, my budding addiction was evident.
Back when I worked that big gig , Blackberry was the official device (and before that pagers. Yes. I am that old) to keep in contact with the network and the world. Blackberry is a Research In Motion product, no stranger to service issues over the years. Years ago, while I was still in the thick of network news, Research In Motion had some sort of massive system-wide hiccup that resulted in a number of Blackberry users being in the dark for several hours. It became clear to me, when I started turning the device off and on combined with serious hyperventilating, the extent of my own dependency/addiction.
Why are we so addicted to our mobile devices? I think it’s easy to say we need them for our jobs; that’s true and a lot of us do. But I do think it’s more than that, rooted in our own sense of self-importance, a nicer way of saying we’re feeding the (not-so) inner narcissist. Take Facebook for example.
Facebook is one huge ego stroke under the guise of functionality. Yes, we use it to share information, photos, catch up on each others’ lives. But there are some who pride themselves on collecting “friends” and using the platform for less sharing and more pontificating. Pontificating (or sharing or whatever you want to call it) is not really the problem, in my humble opinion. I think it’s more the sense of using the platform so that you can be on all the time with those collected “friends” as an audience to feed the ego.
Whenever I see or hear studies like this, I wonder what life was like before the pervasiveness of mobile devices. Did we actually go to bed and turn off, as opposed to now, with 75% of 25-29 year-olds admitting they sleep with their phones.
So you’ve seen the Time Magazine survey; how about a simple Good Enough Mother poll. Could you go a whole day without looking at your smart phone? Tell the truth!
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