This gift, once I had learned how to switch it on, allowed me to see at last what so many people find so fascinating. My wife finally gave me a smartphone in case I had an emergency away from home, even though I always take care to have my emergencies at home. Although the gadgets are called smart phones, they seem to be rarely used as telephones at all, but as a gateway to a whole world of distractions which seem almost designed to cause people to walk into lamp posts. The baffling thing for me and millions of other non-addicts was that we could not understand what was on those tiny screens that was so utterly absorbing. But it hasn’t worked, or at least not yet, as illustrated by this newspaper photograph of 59 people walking down a long flight of steps - a perilous activity in itself - without being able to look away from their screens. It was reasonable to suppose that the casualty statistics from phone users walking into lamp posts or trees, falling down open manholes and wandering obliviously into traffic would soon be enough to persuade the survivors to lift their heads and pay attention to their surroundings. I assumed, as I think most people did, that the habit would just fade away like the craze for carrying water bottles or wearing backward baseball caps. The Japanese have even given them a name: “The heads down crowd.” The sight of someone walking, jogging, pushing a stroller, or even driving with a phone in front of their face became commonplace. Owners couldn’t look away from them, checked them constantly day and night, and suffered breakdowns if their phone was lost or stolen. When smart phones put the internet in everyone’s pocket - and what a stroke of marketing genius that was - these expensive gadgets acquired magnetic power. And Facebook overwhelms them with the sheer weight of three billion individuals struggling to claim their moment of attention in the wired world. Instagram makes them paranoid and fearful. But it’s hard to find anything new to say. Just about every social commentator has written about this, notably Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. The accompanying article by Ezra Klein was, not surprisingly, about the many ways that the internet is shaping and mis-shaping our lives, so there’s no news there. There were 59 figures in all - I counted them - and every single one without exception was gazing at a smart phone. It showed the broad steps of some government or institutional building, with a crowd of mostly young people walking down. A picture in the newspaper caught my attention.
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