Young people addicted to smartphones

An experiment to separate young people from their smartphones discovered that they suffer from anxiety, unhealthy eating and loneliness when they are not online.

Not only are they becoming part of Generation Mute (people who are obsessed with their phones but hardly ever use them to actually speak to people) they are becoming addicted to their mobile devices and appear to be suffereing from FOBO (fear of being off-line).

In the experiment the young people had to live with a basic phone and no internet access for a week.

They missed out on the news and celebrity gossip and were less punctual because they couldn’t access timetables on line. But they did spend more time reading (surprised they knew how to).

Some of the participants slept better. One was appalled at having to use a paper map to find a venue.

The Chief Executive at Innovationbubble which provided the psychologists to run the experiment said “We are psychologically overloaded with so many jobs … which means that mindlessly using our mobile can contribute to our fatigue levels and overall mental health“

Ask yourself why are we overloaded. How did we manage before social media took over the world? Young people can’t think for themselves relying on their mobile devices and spending hours every day on them.

As I’ve posted before this affects their brains .

And as for being lonelier without their phones, the evidence is that using social media like Facebook can actually make you lonelier and depressed.

You’ve got to feel sorry for the millennials

Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, have surveyed 2,000 people aged 18 to 70 on behalf of a Taiwanese electronics company to discover what worried them the most. They were concerned with trivial or “first world” stuff.

The biggest worries were:

• waiting at home all day for online deliveries
• forgetting passwords
• fear of leaving their phones at home (See FOBO)
• not getting enough “likes” on Instagram (See “like-buttons“)

The millennials in the study complained about avocado anxiety i.e. worrying about the quality of avocados in supermarkets – too hard or too mushy? Can’t have all those hipsters skipping  brunch can we?

And a third of Londoners worry about a shortage of Prosecco! This is twice the proportion of the rest of the country. Well they say capital cities don’t reflect the rest of the country.

The researchers compared the results with those from twenty years ago. In 1997 people were worried about:

• having a happy relationship
• earning enough to pay the bills
• getting on the housing ladder

And people say that’s the kind of thing young people are worrying about today. It’s always been a worry!

But back to those fickle Millennials – so much has been written about this generation born between the 80s and the noughts. Sometimes called generation Y because they came after generation X.

Millennials grew up in an electronics-filled and increasingly online and socially-networked world. They are the generation that has received the most marketing attention. As the most ethnically diverse generation, Millennials tend to be tolerant of difference. Having been raised under the mantra “follow your dreams” and being told they were special, they tend to be confident.

While largely a positive trait, the Millennial generation’s confidence has been argued to spill over into the realms of entitlement and narcissism.

They are often seen as slightly more optimistic about the future than other generations – despite the fact that they are the first generation since the those born between the two world wars that is expected to be less economically successful than their parents.

Dumbing down that smartphone

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Have we reached smartphone-peak?

Have we finally realised we need to unplug ourselves from endless apps and social media connections? No more anxiety from FOMO or FOBO?

The NoPhone might have been a prank by two Canadian entrepreneurs having a dig at the latest smartphone upgrade but now there is a real alternative: the Light Phone.

It’s the size of a credit card and can make calls and store 10 numbers and that’s it. Retro or what?

It will be launched in the US by two friends, Joe Hollier and Kaiwei Tang, who used to design Motorola phones (I loved my flip-top Motorola) but grew jaded with the constant pressure to come up with increasingly addictive and life-consuming apps.

If you believe the statistics – and I find these figures unbelievable and not sure of their source – we tap our phones on average 2,617 times a day…

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