Why are so many people now so dependent on, or even addicted to, mobile phones?

PConline Miscellaneous Talk "I once wasted my time on Weibo, and now I am wasting my time on WeChat. You think you are connected to the world through your mobile phone, but in fact you are just hiding behind the screen to gain a sense of security..." If not with your own eyes From what you have seen, you will believe that WeChat, which takes up the most time on Chinese people's mobile phones every day (the launch page of version 4.2 in 2012), actually said such "honest" words, although the omitted words after it are to make you even more inseparable from WeChat.

Nowadays, many people think they see the whole world on their mobile phones, but in fact they just look at a mobile phone every day.

“I don’t like to be found anytime and anywhere”

In 1999, someone conducted an interesting interview on the streets of the United States. Do you need a mobile phone?

Facing the camera, many people said without hesitation that they did not need it.

Some people say that I am not that important and no one wants to contact me anytime and anywhere.

Some people say, I have a home phone, why do I need a mobile phone? When I'm stuck somewhere, I can always find a phone booth or a farmer who lends me a phone...

Some people say that I don't like to be found anytime and anywhere.

Some people said that if anyone wants to contact me, they can write to me, and if it is important, they can call my home phone number.

That year, the mobile phone market was still an era of feature phones. Mobile phones were mainly used for making calls and sending text messages. They were expensive and were still the playthings of the wealthy class. It was also that year that the Nokia 7110, the world's first mobile phone supporting WAP (Wireless Internet Protocol), had just come out. Under the circumstances at that time, it was understandable that people had such a response. On the one hand, consumers could not predict the future, and on the other hand, the mobile phones at that time were indeed not as powerful as those today.

Today, eighteen years later, people’s communication, travel, food and accommodation, work and entertainment are all inseparable from mobile phones. A dreamlike world is hidden in the small screen. Let people get stuck in it and be unable to extricate themselves.

When the mobile phone was first invented, the original intention of scientists was to break down the barriers of space and enable people to communicate more conveniently. But now, people have become its slaves and become more and more alienated from each other. All this is in line with the thought-provoking famous saying, technology is a double-edged sword.

How much time do people spend on their mobile phones every day?

Take China as an example. In the early morning of June 1, 2017, Wall Street securities analyst Mary Meeker, known as the "Queen of the Internet," released the 2017 Internet Trend Report at the Code Conference in the United States. The report shows that China Mobile Internet users exceeded 700 million in 2016 (CNNIC data shows that as of June 2017, the number of mobile Internet users in my country reached 724 million). According to data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the shipment volume of China's mobile phone market in 2017 was 490 million units, which means that almost one out of every three Chinese people bought a new mobile phone last year. It can be seen that mobile phones have become highly popular in China and have become an indispensable product in most people's lives.

The report also shows that in 2016, Chinese mobile users spent more than 2.5 billion hours online every day, which means that the average Chinese spends more than three hours a day on their mobile phones. In 2017, with the popularity of "Onmyoji", "Honor of Kings" and chicken-eating games, the time people spend staring at screens every day has only increased.

What do you play on your mobile phone every day?

The Queen’s report also shows that the most frequently used applications by Chinese people every day are WeChat, QQ, iQiyi, UC Browser and Weibo. Chinese users spend 3.1 billion hours on mobile applications every day, of which WeChat alone accounts for 900 million hours.

Seeing these data, people can’t help but picture this: It’s three or four o’clock in the morning and they are still browsing WeChat aimlessly. Sometimes they wake up from their dreams and can’t help but turn over and turn on their mobile phones to continue browsing. , I woke up early the next morning and turned on my phone to see if anyone was looking for me, and what was updated in my circle of friends late at night...

While waiting at a red light, on the subway, eating, chatting, or even being intimate with a couple. ...Almost every moment we have a moment where we can't help but want to turn on the phone, even if we don't do anything, we just light up the screen, swipe a few times, and then turn off the screen. Some people even feel uncomfortable when their mobile phone battery is low, and not using their mobile phone for a day is like killing themselves.

Why do people play with their mobile phones endlessly every day?

Mobile phones not only consume a lot of our daily time, but also profoundly affect our connections with other people: when a family gets together, instead of talking happily, they each look at the computer and mobile phone; when friends get together, Instead of gossiping about the past, we are busy scrolling through Weibo and WeChat Moments; during class, the teacher is making witty remarks on the podium, while the students below are playing games and watching videos; during the meeting, the boss is talking about the annual plan, but the people below are Busy answering emails and sending messages...

Called the "Freud" of technology by Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, a leading social psychologist in the field of the relationship between people and technology Turkle attributed these phenomena to “group loneliness”—we seem to be together but actually live in our own “bubbles.” We expect less from others and more from technology.

Has constant contact plunged human beings into deeper loneliness?

In February 2012, Sherry Turkle once again took the TED podium and brought us a profound discussion on the relationship between human beings and Speech on the relationship between technology: "Always connected, but still feeling lonely (Connected, but alone?)". In her speech, Sherry Turkle summarized the three major illusions that make people obsessed with mobile phones or other electronic products: 1. We can allocate our energy wherever we want; 2. There will always be someone to listen to us; 3. We Never have to be alone.

We can allocate our energy wherever we want to pay attention

In the past, we thought that playing with mobile phones during class or meals would be considered a strange or annoying thing. It's become commonplace now. People always want to be able to be with each other and be "elsewhere" at the same time - connected to wherever they want to be. Everyone is used to being "alone together" like this because the most important thing to them is control. and allocate their energy.

As Zhihu netizen JZeng said, what we rely on is not mobile phones, but the entire world connected through mobile phones. Technology allows us to stay connected to the world anytime and anywhere, just like breathing air. That world full of temptations is obviously more attractive than the people and things around you - until they are lost.

There will always be people listening to us

“No matter which generation, people can’t get enough attention from each other.” On Weibo and WeChat Moments, we have countless of automatically generated “audiences,” the feeling that no one wants to listen makes us more willing to stay with machines that seem to care about us.

Perhaps many people hope that one day, a higher version of Siri, the intelligent voice assistant of Apple's iPhone, will be more like a good friend, a best friend who listens patiently when others have no time to care about you.

We never have to be alone

When the girl I had a crush on for a long time in high school posted in the circle of friends the beautiful male protagonist of the love mobile game "Love and Producer" When Li Zeyan added the text: "The earth no longer needs men," I had mixed feelings in my heart. If there continues to be news that someone wants to marry an iPhone again, I don’t think I will be surprised anymore.

On January 9, 2010, at the Adult Entertainment Exhibition in Las Vegas, the "Real Partner" company launched the world's first beauty sex robot, Roxy. A US survey found that two-thirds of men aged 20-61 want to have sex with robots.

People come into this world naked and leave naked again. The human heart is full of twists and turns, and the mind goes through thousands of times. Who can really understand whom? Loneliness is an irredeemable and eternal proposition for human beings.

Why not talk face to face?

Sherry Turkle once asked why people don’t talk face to face? Someone answered: Because face-to-face conversations happen in real time, you can't control what you have to say. Yes, through smartphones, what we present in WeChat Moments and Weibo are all edited, modified, polished and deleted to achieve what we want to become. Once you communicate face to face, you will panic, you will not understand your words, and you will make small mistakes, so that we will not be perfect in the eyes of others.

But don’t these tiny, brief snippets of online communication add up to a real conversation? "No, this kind of small fragments of communication may be able to collect carefully polished information, but it is difficult for us to understand each other and truly know and understand each other."

What are the dangers of being addicted to mobile phones? ? The low-down people actually destroyed the earth

The emergence of mobile phones has brought us countless conveniences, but it has also made the warmth of this world gradually disappear. Are you really happy when you are immersed in social software every day, using likes to maintain your shaky relationship, and behind all the hilarious emoticons?

American photographer Eric Pickersgill took a set of photos that went viral, showing interesting scenes of people having their cellphones deleted

Human beings have countless imaginations about the destruction of the earth. The sun burns out, planets collide, nuclear bombs explode, sea levels rise... Have you ever thought about lowering your head to play with your mobile phone and causing the destruction of the earth?

The author of the cartoon "Bow Down Life" depicts the living conditions of the bow down people in an exaggerated way. Everyone whose bow is so low that it is distorted only pays attention to his own mobile phone screen, regardless of the life or death of others. In the end, a series of events triggered the butterfly effect and led to the destruction of the earth! At the Student Oscars in September 2017, Xie Chenglin from Central Academy of Fine Arts won the 44th Student Oscars Animated Short Gold Award with this film. Although the film's technique is exaggerated, many people exclaimed: It hurts my heart!

A young woman who saw someone dead and just took a selfie in the interest

Conclusion

Along the way, mobile phones are just an obsession in the long history of mankind. Just a small tool. We used to be obsessed with televisions and computers. No one has a clue what we will be obsessed with in the future.

What critic Neil Postman worried about in his 1985 classic "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is timeless: Humanity has become a silent appendage of entertainment, without complaint or even willingly. The result is that we have become a species that entertains itself to death.

We keep scrolling and posting on WeChat Moments every day, allowing those insignificant people to take up all of our lives. "I share, therefore I exist"? No, put down your phone and you will understand. "Sometimes you want to prove it to ten thousand people, but in the end you find that only one person understands, and that is enough."

We are not saying to abandon it completely. Mobile phones, abandon all addictive electronic products, and return to the era of darkness and "slowness before". "I just suggest that we should establish a more self-aware relationship with our electronic devices, with others, and with ourselves." Sherry Turkle said.

The Spring Festival is almost here. I hope we can hear less of our elders complaining at the dinner table: "Family love is no match for machines."