Smartphone sanity

I have decided to coin a new word: "Mobiliophilia".

This realisation stems from the discovery that mobiles, and more appropriately, smartphones, have taken over our lives in a way that their creators could never have anticipated.

One must admit that smartphones are indeed a crucial part of our lives. Apart from the basic purpose of "anywhere" telephonic conversation, smartphones serve as a complete panacea for one's daily needs.

You go to the market. The shopkeeper, especially if young, has his eyes glued to the video on his mobile and is palpably annoyed when your disturbing presence, and worse still, request for an item, interrupts the thrilling screen moments.

The car driver, having deposited you at whatever destination, immediately goes back to the video game that your journey had interrupted in its unreasonableness.

You queue up before the bank counter. In front of you and behind you are young men and women who, not inclined to waste their time on mundane banking services, have their eyes glued to the mobile screen with fingers rapidly scrolling to detect the latest in WhatsApp, Facebook, X, or Instagram, as the case may be.

Mobiliophiles cross roads, railway tracks, busy intersections, and merrily jaywalk while talking into their mobiles or keeping their eyes glued to their phones. As an additional embellishment, earphones add to their joy in their smartphone concentration to the considerable peril of others.

You have people over, and lo and behold, most of your guests are busy scrolling their mobiles for the latest. Enjoyable social discussions are history. In meetings, participants are either covertly scrolling under the table or aggressively pursuing their Google search upfront to come up with the recent updates.

In movie theatres, theatrical performances, or musical presentations, after the first few moments of appreciation, it's either videography of the performance, loud narration of attendance to their friends on the phone, or admiration of their latest Facebook status that takes over. Sadly, they miss out on the subtle moments of the performances, thanks to technology.

Come to puja pandals. Nobody has the time to admire the pandals' ethnic beauty, the structural innovations, or the regal aura of the deities. It's endless photography. Sometimes, I wonder when these avid mobilophiles would have the time to actually recall these photos and countless videos shot in lieu of etching the ethereal beauty in their minds.

In tours, very few tourists actually stop to take in the beauty of nature. It's always 'Selfie first' to be the first to post on Facebook.

Having said all this, two primary questions come to my mind. First, is the smartphone-driven technology able to adequately substitute the original activities that we conduct on the smartphone? Second, is smartphone dependency here to stay?

To answer the first question, let me, at the outset, address the subject of reading. Smartphone reading is mostly through text messages, WhatsApp forwards, Facebook statuses, and Instagram posts or downloaded reading matter. There is indeed plenty of such rapid reading in the digital era, but the superficiality of such emoji-driven language presents a sharp contrast to the long reading of the analogue era.

Rapid digital era reading, embellished with monosyllables and emojis, hardly allows the reader, who is in a tearing hurry, to think. In deep, high-level reading, the reader is critical in his perusal and analytical in his absorption of thoughts. He questions and concludes after rational introspection. In the digital era, where all is abbreviated, curtailed, and symbolic, the reader is a mere spectator. He is vulnerable and gullible and takes in each forward like a sponge without pausing to question the veracity of the matter. While the digital reader swallows, the analog reader digests. The smartphone reader becomes vulnerable in getting pulled into fakes, deep fakes, and other AI-driven ancillaries to be manipulated by distorted and manipulated misinformation.

Sensible decision-making and creative thinking require deep and slow reading of texts, and smartphone-driven emojis and monosyllables are hardly the best substitutes for critical thoughts. It has hence been famously said that “War is what happens when language fails.”

I fall into the minority category of long readers. I love reading in lawns, in winter sunshine and in the August rain, holding a book in my hands and the sky overhead.

Yes, I know that the smartphone is a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopaedia rolled into one. Call me old-fashioned if you will, but the sheer exercise of finding the right word by turning the pages of a dictionary, thesaurus, or an encyclopaedia is a learning experience by itself. Such laborious findings lead to much stronger memory recall compared to the ‘Search and Forget’ process on a smartphone.

I next approach the subject of photography. While almost everyone scrambles to shoot with their latest smartphones, I admire the serene and discerning photographer with a DSLR who knows what he is doing. The DSLR user knows that his camera has a much larger sensor than even the best smartphone cameras. And, in photography, at the end of the day, what matters most is the quality of the captured image.

Coming to the performing arts, listening to or watching an artist perform live is often a sublime experience. Every move, expression, and the intensity of concentration are unique. The emotive translation of renderings between the artist and the audience or the spectator is hard to digitise. As they say, smartphones can replicate the technique, not create the originality of a genius.

A similar experience awaits in movie theatres where watching a high-voltage drama in a well-equipped hall cannot be reproduced by smartphones or fire sticks. The ambiance of a well-fitted movie theatre still remains to be cherished; one reason why certain movies continue to turn out huge box office hits.

Having analysed as above, I arrive at the second question, namely the future dependency on smartphones.

It is estimated that currently there are 10 billion smartphone users in the world, and the usage is expected to grow at 5 per cent per annum. The Chinese, of whom 910.04 million use smartphones, are the biggest users of smartphones in the world, whereas Germany has the highest usage per capita. It has been gathered that 73.7 per cent of the population in the USA use smartphones. The proportions are 45.7 per cent in India, 69.7 per cent in Indonesia, 64.5 per cent in Brazil, 78.4 per cent in Japan, 63.8 per cent in China, and 82.4 per cent in Germany, respectively.

Hence, given the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, their massive global usage, and expected rate of growth, the device is not only here to stay but also to take over in a big way. Quite a lot of surprises also await us thanks to AI and other technological innovations of the future. So the answer is an admitted prevalence of smartphones in the future.

The younger generation is raring to go in a fiercely competitive world and would not like to slow down to compromise on pace or time. Resultantly, their smartphone dependency will continue to grow, and the manufacturers would indulge in higher research to offer more services to be made available in the 6.2 inches frame.

I had started with the term ‘mobilophilia’. Would ‘Mobile Sanity’ be the coinage for the future?

The writer is a retired IAS and Former Secretary to the Government of India. Views expressed are personal