Life Before Mobile Phones
Outsource your brain at your peril.
Let me just say from the outset that I am a technology geek. I have an iPhone I use for a wide variety of tasks such as checking email, listening to music, browsing the web, playing Scrabble, watching TV, listening to the radio, taking and editing photos, finding my way around via Google or Apple maps, reading books, magazines & newspapers, checking Facebook & Twitter, monitoring my dietary intake, and oh yes, making phone calls.
While the device has certainly been a major convenience for me, it has also cut activities now considered retro. No longer do I sprawl maps out on a table or car dashboard or search behind bushes and under cars for the morning newspaper. Nor do I play Scrabble at the dinner table with three other people or listen to the radio. I also find it troubling that my handwriting has taken a serious nose dive from what it was when I was in college. I could go on, but these activities amounted to a certain number of calories being burned each day, not a whole lot for sure, but certainly enough for me to be 10 pounds lighter than I am today.
And then there is the problem with memory. In high school I was able to recite entire phone lists of friends and classmates without giving it a second thought. This of course required dialing seven to ten digit numbers into keypads or rotary dials, no big deal really. Now the act of dialing a phone number has been simplified to the point of tapping names in a list on your smartphone or asking Siri to do it for you. There is no need to remember numbers anymore, which can prove embarassing when you can’t remember your own wife’s telephone number.
All of this may not be such a big deal, but I do think increasingly outsourcing your brain to tech gadgets does not do it any favors. If you decide to go through with this outsourcing, as I have in many cases, I suggest you substitute it with something else to keep the activity flowing, be it reading a book, memorizing poetry, playing music, drawing or whatever. Our apps claim to make us all more productive, and allow us extra time to contemplate the meaning of life, learn Latin or tap dance. But as far as I can tell, this is a myth.
I fear my brain will whither away sooner than planned if I don’t act now.
The Atlantic has an article as a good followup to what I’ve just written above, where it talks about how phones and the internet in general have affected our way of thinking. I recommend it