'My New Year's resolution: give up the iPhone'
Wandering around any city centre these days is to step into a zombie movie; hollow men and women shuffling along, heads bowed, occasionally knocking into lamp posts or passing dogs. The clue is in their hands.Around the world, entire cities are being redesigned to protect smartphone users from traffic: flashing lights installed at the edge of German pavements and even, in Beijing, separate pedestrian lanes.
Smartphones provide information at the drop of a hat, pooling human knowledge in once unimaginable ways. But they are also – paradoxically – making us dimmer, with shorter attention spans, reduced memory banks and far less patience. Despite the opportunities to read any classic novel for free or learn a new language, I suspect the biggest winners in this knowledge revolution have been YouTube stars and pets that resemble dictators.
The ascendancy of the iPhone has left us terminally unable to enjoy the moment. Last year, the society photographer Dafydd Jones, famous for his shots of a young Nigella Lawson playing croquet in a sedan chair as an Oxford undergraduate, mounted a new exhibition of glossy partygoers glued to their phones.
Having lost myself once too often after my phone died, my New Year’s resolution is to spend less time in front of a screen. To end the miserable accumulation of unfinished books and abandoned thank you letters. Starting tomorrow.
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