Ignore your smartphone’s provocative digital wink

Smartphones are often carried by dumb people, argues Justin Thomas

The allure of smartphones, such as this Samsung model, is often too much for people to ignore. Albert Gea / Reuters

My heart occasionally whispers spontaneous prayers. Worryingly, these voiceless supplications have increasingly taken the form of maledictions, which is an ecclesiastical term meaning “curses”. What’s going on in my life to elicit such heartfelt ill will? I suspect that the answer has something to do with smartphones in the hands of not-so-smart people.

Once, mobile communication was all about small, sleek and subtle. Remember the tiny Motorola Wings and the diminutive Nokia 8810? Then WAP happened. Wireless Application Protocol facilitated mobile access to the internet, and devices benefited from having larger screens upon which to display the wonders of the web.

Today, the line between the smartphone and tablet PC is incredibly blurry. Some smartphones are, once again, the size of house bricks. One downside of these supersized devices is their lack of inconspicuousness; they are hard to ignore.

A young couple out to enjoy a candlelit dinner, sit facing each other. One of them however, is repeatedly seduced by their smartphone. The blinking red light, that provocative digital wink, is too much of a temptation: somebody wants you, it seems to urge in a breathy whisper. Relentlessly, he checks the phone throughout the meal, unapologetically responding to messages from whoever. She, the real-life partner, is smiling but crying on the inside. Patiently, she waits for scraps of leftover attention. And so, my heart whispers a malediction.

A socially anxious student desperately tries to swallow her fear as she approaches the front of the class. With shaky hands and a voice to match, she begins her oral presentation. Eventually, she summons up just enough courage to glance up from her cue cards. Unfortunately, the first thing she sees is her classmate grinning into a smartphone, while simultaneously poking out a response to the sender of the amusing titbit. This act of gross inattentiveness sends out a damaging message to the fragile presenter: we’re not interested; you bore us. And so, the silent malediction.

The traffic starts to behave erratically, we slow down and everyone starts to lane-hop. The cause is a young man who is insistent on messaging while driving. He is the worst kind of offender, rapidly slowing down his oversized car so he can exchange messages on his oversized smartphone. Even in the night, behind dark windows, you can see him, the car’s interior lit up by the smartphone’s intoxicating glow.

The leading cause of death for young people in the UAE is road traffic accidents. Yet, the lure of the smartphone is so great that this driver is willing to risk his own life and, more importantly, the lives of fellow road users (men, women and children), simply because he can’t wait to exchange digital banalities. And so, that whispered malediction.

The movie is at a critical juncture: will she won’t she? The big screen dialogue is interrupted by an annoying message alert, followed by the squeaky tap tap tap of a smartphone user who hasn’t realised that it’s possible to turn keypad tones off. Furthermore, the device is so large that it lights up the whole row, further degrading everyone’s cinematic experience. That’s why that silent malediction.

The human tendency for self-serving biases will, of course, allow us to quickly rationalise such behaviours when we ourselves are guilty of them. We often dress our smartphone use up in fancy, legitimising, terms like: social networking, micro blogging, awareness raising, or saving souls. However, in reality, what we are often doing is no more than fulfilling our basic human drive for attention.

I’m not against seeking attention. At one level, attention is absolutely necessary for healthy human development. But serious issues arise when our technologically mediated attention exchanges distract, deprive and potentially damage other people.

Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University and author of Psychological Well-Being in the Gulf States

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas