‘No more phone Daddy,’ says a little girl wanting Daddy to put his phone down for a few minutes and talk to her. 

Sound familiar? This could be any household, any family, and any parent where the mobile phone has become a fundamental part of day-to-day life. It is ubiquitous and permeating. I have written before on this topic, but it is one close to my heart so here I go again bearing in mind that I too am not without fault.

Is it force of habit, obsession, dependency, or addiction? I would argue it is all of these because the one thing we cannot survive without is our mobile phone. That one device that has become super glued to our bodies all day and, for some, most of the night has robbed us of our right to stay in control of our existence. This is probably true for the majority of people and if it doesn’t apply to you, I salute you. You are heroes and enjoy a far better existence than those cemented to a screen.

It is the last thing we look at before we go to sleep and the first thing when we wake up. It follows us throughout the day, in more ways than in the literal sense but is this attachment justified? Perhaps it is as it delivers everything from contacting people (what it was originally intended for) to providing the latest and up-to-date information. One click is all it takes to experience the thrill and excitement of the countless ways in which our phone can entertain, educate, inform, assist, and guide us. It is THE MOST heavily used item in our possession. 

Without it, we feel lost. Not only lost but, sadly, as if a body part is missing. This dependency is neither wholesome nor healthy and can lead to a hindrance in our off-screen social lives. Take a look around you next time you are in a social setting and count the number of people using their phones. What are my friends doing today? Have they checked in anywhere? Are they home? What pictures have they posted? What are they watching, reading, attending? Can I see their children? Hang on, let me check my phone and all my questions will be answered. 

The one thing I couldn’t cope without is being able to ‘Google it’. This evokes an amusing memory from when I was teaching a Year 11 class about the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web. Presented with the question, ‘what is the internet?’ a student answered with total conviction, ‘it’s Google miss, it’s Google.’ To her, the internet WAS Google. Hence the power of this search engine to which we turn at every possible opportunity. 

Though it concerns me no end, I am guilty too. Rushing to get to work one morning, I pulled up in the school car park and went to grab my phone. To my utter horror, I couldn’t find it. Panic set in as I searched the seats, left, right and under. Rummaging through my bag like a maniac soon brought me to the realisation that I had left it at home. 

I even hatched a plan to pick it up at lunchtime. Twenty minutes there and back, another twenty to throw my food down the hatch and done! By lunchtime I had, reluctantly, concluded that going home to pick up my phone was unreasonable and maybe just a little irresponsible. Did I really need it? How could I not last one day without it? It’s not even a day; I finish at 3! 

I ate my lunch and then sat. Glancing round the room I quickly observed that not one person was without a phone. They all stared at a screen whilst I stared at them, itching to know if my email had been answered, what WhatsApp messages I had received, how many notifications awaited me, whether my order had arrived and, of course, who had called. Alas, I must wait another two hours!

As mentioned earlier, our phones follow us around all day. As well as in its physical state, it can also monitor our movements and know exactly where we are and what we might be doing. I recently changed my car for an upgrade. The old car had my home location saved in its Sat Nav system. The new car doesn’t have a built in Sat Nav, yet when I plugged my phone into it, it asked me if I wanted to go home. My phone knows where I live! It wasn’t what I needed to see and did little to settle my nerves. You may also have noticed that a casual conversation has led to adverts appearing in your social media or google feed which relate to what you had been talking about. 

‘Yet there’s quite a bit of concern that these devices are supposed to be always listening. What’s troubling I guess for most, is not the listening, it’s the recording’, says Jamey Tucker in a report on WRCBtv. He goes on to say that, ‘Students at North-eastern University conducted a study that found listening devices such as the Echo Dot (Alexa), Google Home Mini (Google Assistant), Apple HomePod (Siri?) and Harmon Kardon Invoke (Cortana) were activated by accident up to 19 times a day’.

These are always-on listening devices and should only listen when called upon to do so but they don’t always play by the rules. Sometimes the devices, and perhaps even Amazon, behave in ways that would understandably cause concern about privacy and security. 

Today’s children are accustomed to using a wide range of electronic devices. They cannot imagine a life without smartphones, tablets, and the internet. Not only children, but adults too are now living in a world where electronic devices provide interaction for different purposes. Televisions, laptops and computers, mobile phones, tablets, and video games consoles all link to the internet and provide much more than their original intended use. There is no escape from technology, and it will continue to move onwards and upwards at an incredibly fast pace. The question is, can we keep up with it?

My personal goal is to put my phone out of sight when eating, watching television, and reading a book. What will yours be?