Have we become "phone zombies"?

It is "normal", same here.

We have two kinds of people, the smartphone zombies and the ones, who can't use smartphones and reject them, usually older than 40 people. The notorious smartphone users are called "digital natives" and the smartphone rejecters are called "digital immigrants".

The younger ones (me as well) have access to this new technology from a young age on. At a young age, people learn fast and are eagier to learn. The older ones grew up without technology. They learned, how to write letters on a typewriter. In the 2000s, they had to relearn writing letters on a desktop pc. Now they don't write letters anymore, but write text messages on a smartphone. So they learn the use of a smartphone at high age, which is a pain. They get frustrated quickly, and don't feel like figuring it out.

The digital immigrants usually complain, that the phone is the most important thing for the young people, and they don't talk anymore face to face, whereas the digital natives usually complain, that they cannot communicate with their related people, when they are away from home and they left their phone at home and are not reachable.

 

Us millennials aren't all like that. I'm 27 and feel the same damn way. I also see older people 30s and 40s on there phones constantly. What I really cant stand the most is seeing parents on there phone and completely ignoring there children.

 

oh man I just read a book about this very topic, yeah it's definitely a bigger problem than people realize. when you combine our generation's phone usage with excessive consumption of media and our COMPLETE refusal to read during our leasure time, you start to get pretty real anti-intellectual ramifications.

you can look into the agencies that are tasked with tracking the academic/intellectual traits of younger people (NAEP, NSSE) -- you'll find pretty goddam depressing statistics. phone usage and screen time, WAY up (even in demographics under 6 years old). reading, WAY down. and employers are starting to take notice of these trends a la the shockingly low reading and writing skills possessed by us youngins. one businessman polled said that recent graduates "aren't even aware when things are wrong" (Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation, p. 68-69).

but hey, no one wants to talk about depressing stuff like that. so did anyone look at their phone someplace cool this weekend?

 

People who can never put their phones away can buy a one way ticket to fuckoffityland. Seeing that kinda stuff makes me glad I never started Twitter or instagram. When I'm walking somewhere I'm not texting, but if I get a call I may answer it. I also don't text when I'm driving. That just takes the retard cake.

 

I used to be guilty of this, I now aim to leave my phone in a different room for a good 3 hours a day, or even leave it at home when its not required! I also have turned off all my notifications except when someone tries to call me to prevent any distractions.

 

I'm probably the only teen who hates having a phone. It's a big problem in the modern world. Ironically being able to connect to everyone makes it harder to connect to anyone.

 

I often feel like a loser when I show up to any social gathering because I either don't have my phone or never bother to take it out of my pocket while everyone else is constantly checking theirs. It makes me feel like wow, they all have so much going on in their lives and my life is so boring. I sometimes take my phone out and make it look like I'm texting or checking social media just so I don't feel so left out.

 

I must be a zombie-robot since i use the Smartphone 8 hrs a day on average, it is like i can live without it,(sounds like an addiction)

 

Have we become phone zombies?

Short answer yes!

 

I saw this girl damn near kill herself a few months ago. She was looking at her phone and walked through 3 lanes of traffic across the yellow line and didnt realize what she was doing until she looked up and made eye contact with me. The whole street just stopped and looked at her like what an idiot. I almost hit another guy looking at his phone walking through a grocery store parking lot.

 

Yes.

 

From my observations it seems many people, young and old, are glued to their smartphone. I have a cellphone, but usually keep it off or on mute as it can get annoying having people text or call me for no good reason. That and I tend to enjoy going out for walks without a phone or some sort of distraction in my face.

 

I tried to stoo using my smartphone and switched to a dumb phone (Nokia 115) in November last year when I discovered nosurf.com. The experience was mindblowing and eye opening. But I realized you almost cannot do anything anymore with a phone (like approving a wire transfer or a credit card payment). I also ended up completely isolated (even more so that now).

I wish we lived in thr 90s or early 2000s. If we all still had dumb phones, 56k or 128k modems and no more than Internet 1.0 HTML websites, we'd probably not be where we are now.

 

this might be an unpopular opinion but i dont think this is so true. We are the most read generation in All of History. And if you dont want to be reachable turn your phone off. people have always found ways to distract themselves, wheither it was newspapers or books or just spacing out, you cant really blame it completely on the phone.
altho i agree that there should be a no phones at the dinner table rule

 

We are Everyday Robots on our phones.

 

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I think people majorly overreact to this "problem." I've heard so many times situations where, for example, some older person is whining about how kids never read books anymore because their glued to their phone... meanwhile, the person who's looking at their phone is reading an ebook.

Or someone complains that kids never talk to each other, meanwhile the person looking at their phone is texting their friend through a really hard time, or talking to them on social media about something important.

Personally, I think people need to stop judging others for doing what makes them happy, when it's not hurting anybody. And also when you have no idea what they're using their phone for. Making they're working, making money for their family, and then when they get home they put the phone down and spend time with their kids. You just have no idea.

I agree that in some cases, phone addiction and especially social media addiction can be dangerous, but to think that we have some major problem just by observing a lot of people on their phones is silly. I mean imagine when books first became a thing. I bet the old people of those times complained about how kids are always walking around with their nose in a book instead of talking and playing with each other! The horror!

Times change... people like the internet now. It's not the end of the world.

I just get a little irked with this attitude, because it makes me feel like if I pull out my phone in public, people are going to be judging me. Which is ridiculous. I'm not doing anything wrong, and neither is anyone else who wants to use their phone in public. If you don't, cool. That's your choice because it's your preference. But some people want to use their phones more than you do, and that doesn't mean there's something wrong with them or society.