How Harmful Are Smartphones?

For many of us, smartphones have become indispens­able, but they have also come under fire for their impact on the way we think and behave, especially among children. Two of the largest investors in Apple Inc. are urging the iPhone maker to take action against smartphone addiction among children over growing concerns about the negative effects of technology.

An open letter to Apple on January 6, 2018 from New York-based JANA Partners and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS) stated that the firm must do more to help children fight smartphone addiction. These two shareholders to­gether control about $2 billion in Apple stock.

The investors’ letter urged Apple to offer tools to pre­vent smartphone addiction and to provide more paren­tal options for monitoring children’s smartphone usage. The iOS operating system for Apple smartphones and tablets already has limited parental controls for restrict­ing apps, features such as location sharing, and access to certain types of content. The investors felt Apple needs to do more—for example, enable parents to specify the age of the user of the phone during setup, establish limits on screen time, select hours of the day the phone can be used, and block social media services.

The average American teenager who uses a smart­phone receives his or her first phone at age 10 and spends over 4.5 hours a day on it (excluding texting and talking). Seventy-eight percent of teens check their phones at least hourly and 50 percent report feeling “addicted” to their phones. The investors’ letter cited a number of studies on the negative effects of heavy smartphone and social media use on the men­tal and physical health of children whose brains are still developing. These range from distractions in the classroom to a higher risk of suicide and depression.

A recent survey of over 2,300 teachers by the Center on Media and Child Health and the University of Alberta found that 67 percent of the teachers reported that the number of students who are negatively distracted by digital technologies in the classroom is growing. Seventy-five percent of these teachers think students’ ability to focus on educational tasks has decreased. Research by psychology profes­sor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University found that U.S. teenagers who spend 3 hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely, and those who spend 5 hours or more are 71 percent more
likely, to have a risk factor for suicide than those who spend less than 1 hour. This research also showed that eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media have a 27 percent higher risk of depression. Those who spend more than the average time playing sports, hanging out with friends in person, or doing home­work have a significantly lower risk. Additionally, teens who spend 5 or more hours a day on electronic devices are 51 percent more likely to get less than 7 hours of sleep per night (versus the recommended 9).

Nicholas Carr, who has studied the impact of tech­nology on business and culture, shares these con­cerns. He has been highly critical of the Internet’s ef­fect on cognition, and these cognitive effects extend to smartphone use. Carr worries that excessive use of mobile devices diminishes the capacity for concen­tration and contemplation.

Carr recognizes that smartphones provide many use­ful functions in a very handy form. However, this ex­traordinary usefulness gives them too much influence on our attention, thinking, and behavior. Smartphones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, and their effects persist even when we aren’t using the de­vices. Research suggests that the intellect weakens as the brain grows dependent on the technology.

Carr points to the work of Adrian Ward, a cognitive psychologist and marketing professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who for a decade has been study­ing how smartphones and the Internet affect people’s thoughts and judgment. Ward has observed that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces distractions that make it harder to concen­trate on a difficult problem or job. Divided attention impedes reasoning and performance.

A study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology in April 2017 examined how smartphones affected learning in a lecture class with 160 students at the University of Arkansas at Monticello. It found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the class­room scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether students who brought their phones used them or not. A study of 91 U.K. secondary schools, published in 2016 in the jour­nal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up sub­stantially, and the weakest students benefit the most.

Carr also observes that using smartphones ex­tensively can be detrimental to social skills and relationships. Connecting with “friends” electroni­cally via smartphones is not a substitute for genu­ine person-to-person relationships and face-to-face conversations.

Source: Laudon Kenneth C., Laudon Jane Price (2020), Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, Pearson; 16^th edition.