Following up from our previous post ‘How Mobile Phones Distract Us – A Real Life Example‘, Seth Godin speaks of the ‘Paying the smartphone tax‘. Because we are constantly distracted by the device, because we confound urgent and important, and because it seems that it only takes a short time to respond, our lives are deeply transformed. This is a tax on our time and attention. Is it worth it?
What I personally find annoying is the amount of focus that smartphones tend to command when I am looking at something or interacting with it. It is extremely dangerous – even if I forbid myself to interact with my phone in clearly dangerous situations such as driving, I find myself sometimes in awkward situations because I was not paying attention to my surroundings (missed a bus or train stop looking at his phone anyone?). So the tax is sometimes very high.
Seth concludes “Like most things that are taxed, smart phones are often worth it, creating connections and giving us information when we need it. Perhaps, though, turning our phones off for six hours a day would be a useful way to cornering us into creating work we can’t live without”.
Our lives have become more interesting as a result of having a smartphone, but the tax we pay for it on our time and attention might sometimes not be worth the value. Maybe it is time to do an assessment and decide that there might be situations worth shutting the device down?
