Column | The smartphone is like a cigarette

« Do you participate in the internet, » asks the man sitting next to me on a bench. He was just busy kicking bicycle wheels and other metal objects, so that they better fit his cart. Soon he will take them to a recycling point, but now he wants to chat.

He himself does not participate in the internet, the man says: Need no need for anything. « If I want to pass on my meter readings, I just cycle to Waternet. They want us to all take such a telephone with the internet, but that is very expensive. You can also eat sandwiches on the beach with your friends. Or potatoes in the fire. Twenty minutes, in aluminum foil. In the fire. After twenty minutes they are done. » I suddenly ended up in a cooking program.

The life of this man seems impractical and uncomfortable to me (imagine you can’t app!), And at the same time I am jealous. I have a love-hate relationship with the internet. Love: all that apping, and how easy you find interesting ideas. Hate: how the phone seduces you into frictionless entertainment, even if you would rather do something else, such as those interesting ideas actually read from A to Z.

Alice Evans, one of the people I follow thanks to the internet, said something interesting at the online magazine Vox last week. She is investigating King’s College the falling birth rates that you see all over the world. Already wrote in January Financial Times-Editor John Burn-Murdoch that that decrease is not because couples have fewer children, but simply because there are fewer couples. Worldwide, the number of single people is increasing: the « relationship recession » is « the central demographic story of modern times, » said Burn-Murdoch. He linked that to the rise of the smartphone and social media: according to research, it is related to the spread of liberal values ​​and women’s emancipation.

He himself does not participate in the internet, the man says: Need no need for anything

Evans adds something in Vox. It is also the technology itself that prevents people from looking for a partner, she says. There is so much online entertainment, from Tiktok and Netflix to Games and Porno, that there is less reason to go out at all. « All these technological developments give immediate access to the most charismatic, charming content that exists. » The result: young people spend more time alone. Evans refers to a report from Equimundo, an organization that is researching young men, which shows that 65 percent of American men aged 18 to 23 say that « nobody really knows me ». In the same study I read that 48 percent of men aged 18 to 45 find their online life more entitled than their offline life.

The internet has so much to offer that the real world pulls less. In that sense, the smartphone is comparable to a cigarette. They satisfy a desire, and stand in the way of another, less urgently polite desire: to real contact or being healthy.

This week I saw in the cinema OnfallingAbout Aurora, an order picker in a Scottish warehouse. The film is about the poor working conditions of the distribution proletariat: Aurora spends ten hours a day scanning and loading dildos, dolls and, grim enough, aurora. But it is her free time that impressed me the most. Aurora always scrolls through Tiktok, whether she is sitting at her kitchen table or in the work canteen. In the break, her colleagues only talk about series, not about real life. The emotional height or actually low point of the film is the moment that Aurora’s phone breaks down, on which she would rather pay 99 pounds for a quick repair than having the rest of the month eating. To still be able to work, she puts four bags of sugar in her canteen coffee.

When the harmful effects of smartphones and social media are discussed, it is often about the content: how they make girls insecure and boys hate. But the problem is not only what, but also that: the fact that we are working on it all the time. Not long ago we all lived as the man who explained to me how to poft potatoes, he now seems like a different species. Half humanity sustained an addiction in a short time. For people who have a lonely profession, such as Aurora, that is extra harmful. When does she speak someone else? Not during her work and not beyond.

Onfalling ends with a rather one cheesy scene. Due to a power outage, the order pickers cannot work for a while and not scroll. What now? A ball game arises that conjures up a cautious smile on Aurora’s face. Now I hate ball games myself, so the fact that this was the most joyful moment of the film was quite depressing. But the message was clear: being online for eternal stands in the way of our humanity. It is already a cliché, but we can’t hear it often enough.

Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC

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