Are “SMARTphones” causing ADD?! I think so!

iPhone, BlackBerry, Pre, Droid, Sidekick, Jack and now the Nexus One are just a few of the 483 smartphones you’ll find out there on the market these days.  In Q3 2009 alone, over 41 million of these devices were sold worldwide!  There aren’t many people I know anymore that don’t have a smartphone.  I mean, even my mom just got a BlackBerry!  In fact, many of my colleagues at Make It Work have AT LEAST TWO!!

I’m not a doctor or anything, but in my not-so-expert opinion the explosion in sales of these smartphones is causing ADD in the users that purchase them.  I can’t even count the number of times per day I look at my iPhone.  Unless I’m typing at my computer, you’ll probably find it in my hand, and if not it’s DEFINITELY within reach!  The crazy thing is that many people I know are on their smartphone even more than I am each day.  No longer can we make it through a meeting at the office, a dinner with friends/family, a sporting event, a TV show, etc. without checking our smartphone multiple times.  Many times we are either so focused on the need to check our phones or the information we are accessing that we COMPLETELY tune out anything else going on around us.

Can you blame us consumers though?  Smartphones provide us INSTANT information at the tips of our fingers, almost ANYWHERE we go, at ANY time of day!  Whether used for business or personal reasons, they not only store our contacts, calendar and email but also provide us access to: news, our favorite social networking sites, travel information, any music you could think of, games, sports information, weather conditions, financial institutions, movies, etc. (I could go on but Apple has over 100,000 apps alone so you should get the point!)  So, is it really our fault that we crave all of this information? Probably not.  Should we let this distract us from our surroundings? Probably not!

I just turned 28 and already can’t help but think of how scary this obsession/addiction with these devices, and they information they provide us, is going to shape our lives and those of future generations.  I have already seen a decline in written and verbal communication skills just in the last few years (truncated words, missing punctuation, the excessive use of acronymns, etc.)…but we sure as heck can send an email, text, tweet or the like at lightning speed from our smartphones!  This pretty much sums up my point:  my birthday was 12 days ago, I got 33 birthday wishes via facebook, 10 via twitter, 9 via text message, 3 phone calls and 0 cards.

Let’s take a minute and think about all of this…without grabbing our smartphones!

FLOW on!

HMB

Tags: ADD, App Store, Apple, BlackBerry, Communication, Droid, Facebook, iPhone, Make It Work, Nexus One, Palm Pre, Sidekick, Smartphones, Technology, Twitter

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.