Gen-Z may be digital natives, but we’re all a little too attached to our phones. Fair though it may be, from the original Motorola Razr to the Blackberry and finally a string of iPhones, my bond with my brick of glass and metal is reflexive. It feels natural to pick it up when I go somewhere, panic when it’s out of reach – let alone forgotten when I’m away from home – and always in hand if I’m sitting. The toilet, public transit, or under the conference table at work when I should be paying attention.
However, accounting for that need to have it in my hand, I don’t consider myself addicted to my phone. I need to answer that text from my mother or she is going to start calling everyone we know to check up on me. I need to respond to a work email, or Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord message if I don’t want to get written up – as a journalist, I need to answer phone calls as well.
I might be able to work, researching or editing while on the train, or while stuck in traffic. I’ve built slide presentations and data visualizations using my phone, and tracked down and interviewed sources with it when nothing else was available. With my phone, I weathered a six-hour power outage in the middle of my workday last year. With my phone and an old battery I charged at a café, I had entertainment, access to my work materials, and, since my wallet was up an elevator with no power, my bank cards.
Tech is not the problem
So, tech ‘addiction’ is not the problem. Technology is solving more problems every day, fears of AI aside. The problem is what else is on there. There’s the social media, the endless news feeds, the doom scrolling and the barrage of media designed to suck the data out of you so it can be sold to advertisers.
I’ve learned that I’m not even aware when I lose ten minutes to an hour or more just from scrolling. I might sit down to take off my shoes after returning home from the gym, my phone makes a sound, so I investigate, and I click through. Then I click through again, and again, and suddenly it’s been 20 minutes and my neck hurts from the angle I was holding my phone.
I’m finding that this bond I have with the feed beyond the phone is what the problem is, so removing the *feed* is the important part. The phone simply offers too much access, so only by removing the option can I profess to have a healthy relationship with technology.
In this case, it’s because the need for technology and its uses are so much greater now than even five years ago, before a global pandemic and the demands of our Zoom calendars. But we still don’t talk about Baby Boomers and Gen-X with their tech addictions, be it the book of faces or just YouTube on their TV. They click one video and just allow the algorithm to guide them deeper and deeper. The same for social media, except Gen-Z and most Millennials know how to cater their feeds and manipulate the algorithms, while Boomers simply roam the explore/discover/for you page, losing far more time than us youngsters.
The phone is just the dealer. The drug is what’s on the phone. Whether it’s validation, rage, schadenfreude, or joy, the phone is instant gratification, but getting what we want as soon as we want it simply isn’t healthy. As Gen-Z, it’s up to us to course correct before our kids are born needing a screen.