Screen Addiction

Interesting blog from David Callahan, dated Feb 16th, 2011 after attending Mobile World Congress 2011.

Screen addiction: Is less more?
February, Wednesday 16th, 2011 by David Callahan
You see it at every session here in Barcelona – people staring at their smartphone screens, tweeting and chatting, maybe even playing Angry Birds, while presenter after presenter gives their take on the state of the mobile industry.
Now, I’m not being judgmental. I’ll just leave that to someone else – in this case, one Hampus Jakobsson, co-founder of TAT. Speaking at a session on Mobile Innovation in 2020, Jakobssson openly wondered whether the ICT industry – those who create the networks, services and devices – is heading in the wrong direction.
Recalling a presentation he did last month, Jakobsson said he put up a quote on the screen, read it aloud and then asked how many people in the audience had just tweeted it. “About 50 percent of them raised their hand,” he says. “So I said, ‘Did you hear the sentence?’ Then a lot of people lowered their hands, afraid that I would point to them to ask them to repeat it.
“We’re starting to live in a world of interruption technologies. We’re starting to talk to our devices rather than each other, and we have to start thinking about what is the future we really want to create for our children, our colleagues, our friends? Do we want a future where people just stare at their screens, or a future where people actually talk to each other?”
Jakobsson suspects that by adding more and more to the mobile platform, we are reducing communication between people. “Suddenly people are communicating in 140 characters or less. We’re compressing ourselves to machines instead of talking to each other about how we feel.
“We who create these devices, services and networks … have to make sure we create tools that give us more time with each other and less time with machines. If we don’t start thinking about this today, technology will be the fats and sugars of 2020.”
After a public shaming like that, it’s easy to snicker at the screen-staring crowd. But I tend to think that no machine, regardless of how attractive, can stand very long in the way of human beings seeking personal contact. Maybe sometimes we bite off more online social interaction than we can chew – maybe we get lost in Wikipedia or news feeds way too often. Maybe we are seduced by the way an online session implies the availability of everyone we know in the world. But maybe we just need better tools to manage our insatiable curiosity about what’s around the corner.