There will come a day when people will look back at the use of smartphones in our time much in the same way that we look back on the use of lead in drinking and cooking vessels by the Romans, with a gasp and a shocked exclamation: What were they thinking?
If you had predicted 30 years ago that the citizens of liberal democracies would pay large amounts of money to buy and use electronic devices designed to record audio, video, and data surveillance of their private, everyday activities and communications, and share the information with shadowy corporations and government spy agencies, no one would have believed you. It would have seemed an outlandish dystopian fantasy, like something George Orwell would have imagined.
Yet, here we are, in an age where most people find the idea of going through a single day without carrying such a surveillance device around with them, always on, always snooping. We have become so psychologically dependent on these superbugs that we feel a panic at the mere suggestion that we might leave them behind to spend some time in private, in the analog world.
That feeling of panic is so pervasive that it has its own name, a new word for a new emotion that has been adopted almost as quickly as the mobile digital technology that provokes it: Nomophobia – the awful feeling one will have when one has no mo pho[ne]
What is it that smartphone users are so afraid of? Ask them, and they’ll come up with a long list of rationalizations of their nomophobia. They won’t be able to get in touch with their kids, or they might get lost, or they need it for work.
When memory casts its long glance backwards, however, those of us above the age of 40 will see what life used to be like, when people took care of everything without needing a digital surveillance device with them to do it. They’ll remember walking down the street and actually paying attention to the street, waving hello and talking with the people they came across. They’ll remember driving down the road, knowing where they were going. They’ll remember the trust parents had that kids would come home, and then have conversations with each other, face to face.
Younger generations have no memory of a time before the urgent desire to hold a mobile digital device. Nonetheless, they share in the phoneliness this dependence has created.
What’s really underneath that nomophobia? Maybe it’s the growing sense of dreadful realization that some time, years ago, people bought in to an idea that a glowing new digital device could make their lives better, could connect them with a brighter, more entertaining world, could make them feel like they matter, and now, with every tap, with every swipe, with every invisible extraction of their data, they’re growing more and more desperate in their search for any evidence that their investment in the shining screen will pay off.
