Do smart phones make us lazy?

[worldofmutes]

It’s a little difficult to prove it, but essentially- we have convenience and escapism in our hands daily. The tasks we need a machine for (navigating, writing, calculating…&tc.) are simple, practical tools that meet our needs. Yet, the majority of our time spent on them is only superficial entertainment, ways to pass the time indoors.

Smart technology is not making us dumber, experts say

There is no scientific evidence that shows that smartphones and digital technology harm our biological cognitive abilities, according to new research.

www.sciencedaily.com

This article was okay as a counter-argument, but I feel like it’s too politically motivated to glean any truth from it.

 

[Alex The G and T]

Myeh! Kids these days are crippled idiots; always got their face plastered into a shiny screen in their lap... Don't know how to do anything when caught out in the real world...

Oh, excuse me. I meant to say that it is important to also know how to function when the teat is removed.

I live in a very rural area. One can't get very far out of town without finding that the cell service gets very patchy. And when you can get a signal, don't trust it. Every winter, we have half a dozen stories about tourists who followed a short cut recommended by their GPS and ended up stranded, for days, in deep snow on some summertime-only jeep trail. deep in the wilderness. Sometimes they even get out alive.

By the time I was 8 years old, I knew how to navigate through a howling wilderness with a topographical map and a compass. To this day, I prefer a paper map. I find the bigger picture easier to orient than scrolling through tiny images on a small screen. And I do not even want a disembodied voice telling me where the is next turn. I already know that the voice is mistaken.

Happened to my daughter, last summer. Not that I didn't try to teach her how to read a map. Her phone was too smart to be bothered with a bulky piece of paper. Tchah!

Thought she knew how to get the Lake camp. Been there many times; but never drove herself. Took a wrong turn and was lost for hours, in the boonies, no cell service, no one to ask. No capability to text for help.

I'd offered her a map. No, she's too wretched smart to clutter up the car with a map that she couldn't fold, much less read.

Bah!

 

[Foxbat]

I don't know if smart phones make people lazy but they most definitely turn them into idiots. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people cross a busy road engrossed in their smart phone. I'm just surprised there are not more fatalities related to this. The researchers need to put down their own phones and go look for themselves.

 

[Danny McG]

Myeh! Kids these days are crippled idiots; always got their face plastered into a shiny screen in their lap... Don't know how to do anything when caught out in the real world

Blast from the past!
I remember my dad saying very similar when I was watching telly instead of playing outside

 

[farntfar]

It's like I was telling Aaron, it seems like only yesterday. This papyrus lark is just a passing phase.
I give it another 6 thousand years or so and no-one will be using it any more.

 

[Elckerlyc]

The times they are a-changing. As they have always done. We lose some ability, but gain another, newfangled one.
We city folk lost the ability to keep ourselves alive simply by what nature provides. If all the supermarkets were blasted to smithereens by the Dark Lord, we would all perish. If petrol, gas or whatever ran out and all cars turned into... whatever use you have for boxes that are no longer mobile unless you push them, we would have to travel on foot on or horseback. And most of us don't own horses and can't walk half a mile without getting blisters or pain in the back. We lost many handcrafts because of industrialization and machination.
The problem with smartphones isn't that it makes you dumber or lazy. Your acquire new abilities, but are mostly about what you can do with that toy. The real problem is that it preoccupies people, absorbs their attention, that they trust it to always be there. The number of traffic accidents are rising significantly, because people find their smartphone more interesting than paying attention to traffic. They ignore the people around them, exchange live social contacts for digital ones.
There have always been people who can't read maps or have no sense of orientation whatsoever. Navigation apps might actually be of help to them, so they are now able to get somewhere without pulling over constantly to ask people for directions. Following it regardless is blind trust, a surrendering to tech. Inadvisable, but there it is.

 

[mosaix]

A friend of mine bemoans the Satnav and loss of map reading skills. But I’m sure the introduction of maps and the losing of the ability to ‘read’ one’s way in the wild or follow the stars involved just as much of a skill transfer.

I suppose it depends on the use of the smart phone - chatting or learning? Would we be so critical if people had their heads buried in an encyclopaedia rather than a smart phone? But that’s a value judgement and I try to steer clear of those.

 

[hitmouse]

I was a lazy degenerate long before smart phones appeared.

In fact I was doing very well on that account before I got addicted to the internet in about 1990.

All you need is a packet of crisps and a pile of cheap sf novels.

 

[Montero]

A friend of mine is a very serious re-enactor - as in they live for weeks at a time with only 17th century technology. The rest of her family have long said that in the event of the apocalypse they're all heading for her place as she knows how to live in those times.

Other than that, a tool is only as good as the skill of the user. I've seen muppets driving the wrong way down a one way street, past all the signs "the Satnav told me" (or they did it deliberately as a short cut and blamed the satnav) and then there are the people who drive past narrow lane signs while driving in a wider vehicle because the Satnav told them too. (And note at this point there are several grades of SatNav and the one for big vans that would route you away from narrow lanes is more expensive so self-employed couriers can't afford and get their whacking great vans stuck or are clipping dry stone walls etc.)

 

[Matteo]

I just saw this on the right-hand side of the screen - which I thought was apt...

 

[Wayne Mack]

I've found that having GPS makes me more daring when I travel. Instead of sticking to the main route that I can easily follow on the map, I am more emboldened to turn off when I see something interesting and feel comfortable that I can find my way back without problem.

 

[Dave]

Kids these days are crippled idiots; always got their face plastered into a shiny screen in their lap...

I remember my dad saying very similar when I was watching telly instead of playing outside

It's like I was telling Aaron, it seems like only yesterday. This papyrus lark is just a passing phase.

@farntfar isn't too far off the truth. In the 19h Century, Woman's Magazines were going to make them stupid too.

 

[Alex The G and T]

A while back, we began getting phone calls from delivery drivers and some friends wha hadn't been to the house before.

They'd all been directed to the top of a dead end road about a quarter mile from the house, as the crow flies. Unfortunately, you can't get here from there without a machete. The crow has to fly higher than the redwood forest.

Google maps had pegged the location of the house from the sat pics; but our access road is hidden from spy sats by tree canopy. Indeed, the closest road on the map is the dead-ender on the other side of the gulch.

Too many of these calls and I got annoyed enough to seek a "report" function in Google maps.

They actually have a function where I was able draw in my driveway, and pinpoint where my street address meets the public road.

Which seemed like a terrible breach of security. We kinda like being hidden away; but the pizzas are hotter when the driver finds the place on the first go.

 

[Astro Pen]

The more you mediate life through your phone the easier it will be for your life to be switched off by hostile corporations or government.
A real possibility now, as we have witnessed recently.
I have even noticed people paying in shops eschewing bank cards for a bank phone app of some sort
"Danger, Will Robinson."

 

[Ian Fortytwo]

What will people do when technology breaks down? I have map reading skills, and I use pen and paper as well.

 

[Swank]

What will people do when technology breaks down? I have map reading skills, and I use pen and paper as well.

But can you make paper or shoe a horse? Ever forge a hinge?

I don't know if there is much point talking about technology breakdowns. They are never going to be like what we picture, and there are always alternatives to going backwards.


Are smartphones making "us" lazy? The regular population is always doing something less than ideal. But are the smart people going downhill because of smart phones? Probably not. I have had the ability to learn more since the internet and smartphones than before, and I'm retaining it.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I don't know if smart phones make people lazy but they most definitely turn them into idiots. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people cross a busy road engrossed in their smart phone. I'm just surprised there are not more fatalities related to this. The researchers need to put down their own phones and go look for themselves.

Wonder how many of them are reading their books. It used to happen with books.

What will people do when technology breaks down? I have map reading skills, and I use pen and paper as well.

I have a lot of skills but as long as we have technology a lot of them are fast becoming obsolete. There's no point being able to read a bus timetable, for example, if they don't exist. I don't drive. As a non driver when my phone broke down recently I discovered how much of my knowledge was still useless. If I had been in a strange place where I didn't at least have a reasonable knowledge of what was were and roughly when the buses ran I'd have been stuck,

There are far fewer clocks around. You can't take notes if something requires a QR code to see it in the first place. And you can't just phone a taxi from a phone box because they no longer exist. I couldn't even get in the college system to hand in my essay without a phone - there's no physical place to go and take a handwritten essay anymore.

 

[cyprus7]

I once amused a younger family member by navigating (walking) with a Google maps screenshot.

 

[Foxbat]

My colleagues in the lab used to laugh at me when I sometimes shunned the available technology and did stuff like long division by hand. It’s a habit I had drilled into me by my maths teacher. He used to say: what will you do when your calculator batteries run out?

 

[farntfar]

I don't know if smart phones make people lazy but they most definitely turn them into idiots. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people cross a busy road engrossed in their smart phone. I'm just surprised there are not more fatalities related to this. The researchers need to put down their own phones and go look for themselves.

Having read the above, I was amused this afternoon to see a guy walking along the Rue Garibaldi in Lyon reading a hard-back book so intently that he crashed straight into a lamppost.
As far as I could see from where I was sitting, it was an Azimov, but I couldn't tell you which one.