On today’s The Right Hook, Dave McIntyre will be telling George the story of how a night without his smartphone opened up a whole new world of opportunity.
Tune in live at 5.45pm: http://www.newstalk.com/player/
When it comes to smartphones and devices, it would seem we’re already hooked. Can you recall the last time you were bored? Give it some real thought. Mind-numbingly bored. With no alternative but your own thoughts to stave off the ennui. Chances are your boredom hasn’t piqued between 4.30 and 7pm in the better part of a decade – not to mention ‘the best of...’ on Sunday mornings – but since the arrival and domination of the iPhone, every moment we have to spare is spent on apps and the Internet.
It’s almost as if the opportunities to get bored have been removed from western society – provided your battery life hasn’t entirely wasted away.
In late 2014, a new study by the Flurry research group revealed that the average person spends two hours and 57 minutes of their day on a mobile device. Worse still, the instinct to reach for our devices at the first moment of idleness appears to have become an innately reflexive response. We cannot wait for someone else to arrive without Tweeting. We cannot sit in a café drinking coffee without a scroll through Facebook. We’ve trained our brains to scan huge volumes of information, distilled to the fewest digital characters possible, providing zero context but an endless feed. Do doctors’ waiting rooms even stock well-thumbed issues of Woman’s Way anymore?
Our device dependency hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed; there are now countless apps proselytising ways to unplug and be mindful, step-by-step guides likely to raise stress levels in 4G reception causes them to buffer.
But does this constant connectivity to all of the world’s information all of the time come at a price to humanity? What is it doing to our true potential? While the ease of communication and idea sharing has never been more second nature, does it curtail the amount of ideas we’re having in the first place?
A study by UK psychologist Sandi Mann suggests that most of our original ideas and schemes come about directly as a result of allowing ourselves a moment of boredom. Dr Mann’s research found that it seems when we complete the most mundane task with no distraction (she asked test subjects to read the phonebook) wandering minds come up with the most unique thoughts.
“You come up with really great stuff when you don’t have that easy lazy junk food diet of the phone to scroll all the time,” Mann told the New York radio station WNYC.
It’s also the reason why shower thoughts – moments of clarity so searingly insightful there’s an entire sub-Reddit dedicated to them – come to us with their burning brilliance, as while we’re lathering up, we’ve left our phones elsewhere.
The constant presence of a digital device grasped between our own digits truly doesn’t leave a lot of time for idle thoughts. A 2013 report by Kleiner, Caulfield, Perkins & Byers found that the average smartphone junkie checks his or her device 150 times a day. So when are we supposed to find the time to be bored?
