Unless you are a hermit, purposefully self-secluded from modern society, you likely in some capacity struggle with some form of cell phone addiction. I haven't even wrote a hundred words, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't check my phone for several extended periods of times.
And why wouldn't you?
Cell phones are easily one of the, if not the most, important inventions in all of human history, allowing for nearly instant access to any information one could possibly need.
Our pocket computers make so many parts of our lives so much easier. We can communicate with others in an instant, regardless of the space between us, through text and call from anywhere. If we don't know how to do something, or are having an issue, there's likely hundreds of youtube videos answering all of our questions in a concise, easy to understand manner. We can do a quick google search, and seemingly the entire library of all human knowledge is there, available to us for free, right at the edge of our fingertips.
The major convenience presented by the cellphone, should, and in many ways does, make life much more convenient and efficient. These days, ignorance is almost a choice, as while the ability to educate oneself was so elusive in decades prior, today we can learn more than our predecessors would've ever dreamed of.
However, despite the fact that cell phones are one of the greatest tools man has ever created, it is also becoming our downfall, and causing major harm in ways that I doubt its pioneers would have envisioned (although they likely did, because corporations are evil). The general populace has become extremely impulsive, weak-willed, and the average attention span has been drastically reduced to a near comical extent.
I've certainly felt the harmful side-effects of the cell phone in my own life. I can't remember the last time I read an entire book for fun, when I used to love reading when I was younger. I rarely go hours without checking my phone to escape the moment, or the anxieties of daily life. For every way in which cell phone access has helped me in my personal life, it's likely hurt me in many more ways than I can even Imagine.
In the book Stand out of our Light by James Williams, Williams explores the harmful effects of the world's most widespread legal drug, the cell phone, and questions if it's release into society was ever even ethical, talking about it as if it was a man-made pathogen used for biological warfare.
One way in which Williams explores the nefarious effects of the cell phone is by creating an allegory with a made up technology, the iTrainer, which has obvious parallels to the cellphone.
Williams begs the question-"If you wanted to train all of society to be as impulsive and weak-willed as possible, how would you do it? One way would be to invent an impulsivity training device – let’s call it an iTrainer – that delivers an endless supply of informational rewards on demand." By creating this fictional device, the iTrainer, Williams makes it so that we are detached of any urge to be defensive of our usage of cell phones, which he highlights are specifically designed so that we will build an attachment and dependency on them.
Williams discusses the awkward early years, which many of us remember, when the cell phone was seen as new, weird, and an unnecessary luxury that initially attracts odd looks, and how it now it has become so universal, and so much a part of our society that life without them seems much more far-fetched than a life in which we are entirely addicted to them.
Instead of highlighting the positives associate with the cell phone, by using the example of this evil iTrainer, he shows that by over-exposing us to technology, our lives would become much harder to live, with too many distractions. We would prohibit our children from using the iTrainer, although continuing to use it ourselves because we are trapped too far down the rabbit hole to ever return.
The iTrainer further damages our mental health by implementing a rewards system of validation and economic gain that would push many to try and make that money by any means necessary, no matter how slimey the methods are in doing so. Our brains would be, and are, so hardwired to seek validation through the reward of a like or attention that we never leave home without our own iTrainer.
The iTrainer, like the iPhone (and various counterparts) would become the most important thing in many of our lives, what we look at when we wake up and lay our head to rest, what we check constantly for new information, and get anxiety over.
The most harrowing thing Williams says in his long analogy is "Of course, the iTrainer project would never come anywhere close to passing a research ethics review. Launching such a project of societal reshaping, and letting it run unchecked, would clearly be utterly outrageous. So it’s a good thing this is all just a thought experiment." Which sounds like the final words to a goosebumps book.
Williams presents the iTrainer, the iPhone, as a device of horror, an unethical, evil invention that would quickly degrade our society as a whole, and anybody reading this can likely self-reflect and realize how much the cell phone really has ruined us.
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