4/19/2023 0 Comments Www morning sentinel![]() My three-day stretch without my phone suggests not. ![]() Hari helped convince me to avoid becoming another of the addicted. He writes: "If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked who switch tasks every three minutes who are tracked and monitored by social-media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll … we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems." "People who can’t focus will be drawn to more simplistic authoritarian solutions - and less likely to see clearly when they fail," says journalist Johann Hari in his book, "Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention." Since cellphones and social media became ubiquitous, our attention spans and sleep have suffered while anxiety is up, particularly among teenagers. If you're an average American - and who isn't, really? - you spend more than three hours a day using your phone, a focus-draining habit that seems to be rewiring our brains in ways we don't yet understand. I worry about what smartphones are doing to us, the impact they're having on kids and the damage they’re doing to our attention spans.Īre you old enough to remember when people used to read those things called books? Remember when we had not been trained, like Pavlov's dogs, to jump at every buzz and chirp? Remember uninterrupted conversations? On Sundays, I'd often make a point of turning her off, giving us both a much-needed break. I wouldn’t bombard friends and acquaintances with texts. I would try not to stare at her too much, and I would never bring her to a dinner table. I try hard not to be one of those zombies you see, with their hunched backs and blank eyes, the people who have traded the actual for the virtual. Mind you, I'm not one of those people who is always gawking at a phone. She fed me the ball games and podcasts that carried me off to sleep. She told me the temperature and the time. It's not just the missed calls and texts, although that's certainly part of it. Her absence, I'll admit, has been disorienting. This makes me a rarity in this ever-connected world: a human without a cellphone.
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