Your smartphone makes you quick, not smart.

Every time you pick your Smartphone, you stop inventing and begin transacting instead.

The flow of information and style of interaction on our smartphones rewards our eagerness of getting things done quickly. It helps you make decisions in the moment. Which route to drive? Which restaurant to go to? Which email to respond to?

Have you ever been in a bar and observed how many people sit there on their phone texting someone who’s not there? Hmmmmmm, that sounds like a really fun night out! That must be some interesting conversation going on at your table. So many people are completely consumed and obsessed with their phone.  Hello! You are sitting with real human beings. Talk to them, not the virtual humans on your phone.

Do you ever notice the people walking on the walk-way who are constantly checking their phones and answering emails while they walk? They are oblivious to the moving vehicles and careless about their safety. The question is, is your email, video game, facebook, twitter, instagram and snapchat so important that you need to be checking it 24/7? Even at the detriment of your safety?

We have really become an addicted society though. As I sat at the bus-stop recently I couldn’t help but notice people texting, emailing on their smartphones, and some even watching the European champions league matches on their smartphones. A man so engrossed on his phone bumped into a girl selling peanuts securely placed on her head and the whole thing fell off …………….that got me “smiling” , don’t ask me how it all went but I’m sure he paid for it.

Come on folks, what happened to the art of conversation between two people? Do we constantly need to be stimulated by our Smartphone? It’s ridiculous!

What happens when we over-indulge in using smartphones?

We can’t remember phone numbers: The ability to remember eleven-digit number. Because the number we call regularly are stored in our phone, there is no need to actually dial the number, and thus we never look at it again after we enter it in our contacts.

While does this matter? Well, it doesn’t really………until you lose your phone, or the battery goes down, and you need to make an important call and you can’t remember the number and there are no phone books and even if there were, the number wouldn’t be listed because it, too, is a mobile number.

Also, memorizing phone numbers is also probably good mental exercise………….we now do not get.

We can’t spell: People these days say they don’t need to know how to spell because they’ll always have spell-check or autocorrect. True? Probably, yes. But that doesn’t mean we don’t unknowing make mistakes as humans. Written language is one of the things that defines humanity and has allowed us to transmit knowledge. Now we just let the machines do it for us…………because it’s easier.

We don’t pay attention to the world around us: If evolution teaches animals one thing. It’s keep your head up or you’ll be dinner.

Well, thanks to smartphones, humans don’t do that anymore. Instead, we’re walking into fountains, walking into manhole or smashing cars into light poles like a bunch of idiots.

We can’t get anywhere without GPS: Before the advent of smartphones we would have to look at the map and study it a bit to get our bearings in a new and unfamiliar terrain. They gave us a certain kind of environmental intelligence.

Now? We just use our phone, quick and easy……….ahhhhhh! No thinking or remembering required. Just do what the phone says.

We shorten our words: Now we have smileys, emoticons and our vocabulary is reduced to a handful of little yellow faces. And when texting, we don’t type long meaningful words like “unbelievable!” We type things like “whoa!” because they are easier.

We lose sleep: Almost all of us are guilty of this. We all do it-check our email, texts, facebook, sports scores just one more time, when we get up to go to the bathroom. And, before you know it, its morning.

How much sleep are we losing, and how dumb is it making us.

We share too much information: Before smartphones, almost everyone had a dairy and guard them jealously so that no one gets to read it contents, it never occurred to us that it would be a great idea to tell every single person you have ever met about your personal issues like relationship, medical problems, what you had for dinner etc.

Now we share everything with everyone, when we really should not.

Smartphones are lovely, quick and handy but are they really making us smart?

My take on this is;

Smartphones should be used in moderation. We should not let smartphones replace the human in us.