Smart Phones and Stupid Kids

This week we learnt about another interesting topic: all about digital media and the processing of information.

Nowadays, our phones process a lot of info for us that in the past would have been processed by our brains. Pretty clever right, but is this just making us lazy and stupid? Some people think the constant use of mobile phones instead of actually using our brains could be impacting young peoples’ futures (including mine and yours!).

One of the main ideas we focused on was how long term memory may be becoming less important as time goes on. This is because we have all our important memories, passwords and phone numbers with us at all times, all jammed into a small handheld device in our pockets. And if you wanted to be even more 21st century… you don’t even need to keep this stuff stored on your phone, you can shove it on iCloud or Dropbox.

This is the sort of stuff that really confuses my Nana and Grandad, who of course have a phone number and address book kept safely in the dining room cupboard, and would probably keel over at the idea of a ‘shared online data centre’ that we can’t see or touch, or just the cloud to me and you.

I searched around for some more info on how our phones process information for us, using my phone of course, and stumbled across an article by nbcnews.com:

One of the opinions, by Turkle, was that “we need to reclaim face-to-face conversation” as he claimed that having less of a relationship with technology allows us to focus on real life communication. This was following a study that showed children who went to an outdoor camp, and were banished from phones or laptops (is this 1950?🥴), were more able to read people’s emotions and expressions afterwards than kids who did not attend the camp…

This made me reflect on my own experiences and wonder how different I would be if I used my phone less and my brain more, would I be more observant? More caring? More clever? Maybe. Not that anyone would notice as they would be looking down at their phones anyway…

Why use my brain when my phone can do it for me anyway? Surely that allows more space in my brain to think about the important things in life, like Wednesday Union or last night’s Love Island 😋

The article also explored other more optimistic views, like Dr. Hampton who thinks processing and accessing information via our phones may actually be expanding our world views and helping us to maintain relationships. As a teenager, I, of course, side with Hampton over Turkle as I don’t personally think the youth of today are any less intelligent than our older generations, despite our different ways of processing information.

Although it’s still early days in being able to see any real effects of excessive mobile phone use and processing of info on young people, it sure will be interesting to see whether our generation lack any skills in later life because of this.

Is there anything you think we might miss out on in later life because we let our phones do things for us? Let me know in the discussion below