Are iPhones the new cigarette?
I have found myself struggling with checking my phone too often and specifically my email too often through the phone during April 2024. The pull of this product, yes our cellphones are tools but also products, has caught up to me.
In other words, rather than reach for a book, I reach to check my email again. This over-checking is laughable because like most, I get less and less interesting emails. It’s full of more and more announcements from any store or web site that’s snagged it during some past visit or purchase, and never loses track of it, so it seems. The occasional chance of something notable and new is a huge pull if I’m near my cellphone.
Technology companies these days portray themselves as horizon-gazing thinkers, cool disruptive innovators, or know-it-all mega-millionaires, but they also are designers of addictive products. Their phone products, email products, social media products, Twitter and Tic Toc products, all feed into the human questions: What’s next? What’s happening now? Who, what, and where?
Are iPhones the new cigarette?
Social media as well as iPhones are not that much older than cigarettes were when they were advertised widely, used in movies and widely modeled, and probably even promoted as healthy.
Well of course, I can do something about it. It’s called self-control. I often leave my cellphone in my house mail box when I come home, so I can be more at home when home. This said, it’s stayed in my pocket recently.
The poet William Carlos Williams said, “The pure products of America go crazy” in his poem, “To Elsie.” One way to read that phrase is to recognize the tsunami of hype surrounding sellers who sell you out. Time for higher ground.
I miss the peace of reaching for a book, even the quiet boredom yielding to entering a book’s world. As poet Emily Dickinson said, “there is no frigate like a book.” That sentiment could become history. The electronic age is upon us, one predicted by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media. Al Gore wrote about it in his own way, from the perspective of democracy, in his 2007 book, The Assault on Reason.
Are iPhones the new cigarette? It’s also just beginning.
Stay safe,
G. H. Mosson