>> Is Your Smartphone Listening to You, or Is It Just Coincidence?
>> Does Facebook Use Your Phone’s Microphone To Eavesdrop On Your Conversations?
>> How should kids use cellphones? And at what age are they emotionally ready to have their own?
>> Your smartphone is making you stupid, antisocial and unhealthy
>> Is Social Media Destroying Humanity On Purpose?
>> The wireless telephone encouraged us to connect individually but disconnect socially
>> 2017 Social Experiment: Family Gives Up Electronics For 48 Hours
Lesson? They Are All Listening. Presume so. To EVERYTHING within earshot. To your confessions, married special-time, private business chats, secrets, dinner conversation, family fights. Anywhere these computerized phones are present, BigEar may be listening in.
Our Electronic Mini-Masters?
Solution? Turning it off and putting it in a metal box might do the trick. Or, one of these cool RFID/ signal blocker cases… or, just not having one. The addictive little things can wreck your brain anyway, as study after study confirms. At very least, break your smartphone addiction now, so you can have your life & brain back. And those of your loved ones.
Rats In A Maze
When you think about the brain-effects, spying, and biological effects of smartphone & cellphone technology– and the rising number of cancers which might be linked to their use– it strikes me that this is a giant socio-biological experiment with no permission or parameters, introducing many good and bad factors into daily human life, often from toddler on up. Experiment. Like on rats.
For those of us geezers raised in the pre-smartphone/ social media era, all of this is an add-on technology, which can multiply our existing curiousity, wonder, imagination, habits of being & learning & socializing. It’s a power-tool of sorts.
Quick: Example Us, Binks!
SO, for example– I’m currently reading Nigel Tranter’s Margaret The Queen. When I’m reading a book (dead tree or Kindle), I will constantly be looking up places, definitions, pictures of the places, historical summaries, art, related literature, and other interesting detail to flesh out the book. It becomes three-dimensional learning, based on my older trained & ingrained pre-digital habits.
What of the screen-addicted younger people raised in a time who have never known the old ways of curiousity, imagination, extrapolation, a love of learning and the intellect at play? I’m worried that endless music-playlists, SnapChat, InstaGram, flickering bytes and images which go by like dead leaves in a windstorm make it harder to develop those older qualities, which are not simply a “Different” form of intellectual and mental life, but the kind that is thousands of years old, and which built & sustained Western Civilization for thousands of years. Are our kids and grandkids being mentally flickered to death?
Who Did This? Not the Kids
Even if older generations find smartphones are manageable tools, it is a false logic to assume that people raised on them will turn out likewise. It’s that same thing with TV addiction in my youth: the idiot box ate your time, gave you a lazy brain, and– it turns out– wound up aggression even as kids were passively drooling before the one-eyed God.
Smartphones & digital technology are super-TV on meth & cocaine, doing untold damage all around us, even as we look on, semi-uncomprehendingly. “Kids today”, we moan, forgetting that every society creates exactly the kids it deserves. Think about it. ~
Thus saith,
Teh Binks
A Swift Sunrise 