"Interference with my phone is like giving me some brain damage," Clark told Wired. He expressed concern about the dumbphone movement, calling it "generally a retrograde step" and warning that as smartphone enmeshment becomes the societal norm, those who opt out risk becoming "effectively disabled within that society." Clark described this as "the creation of a disempowered class."
Well, if I wondered what the stupidest thing I'd read on the internet today was going to be, I'm pretty sure now.
Some nobody "philosopher" pulls some gestalt-mind-theory out of his ass about smartphones making us part of a meta-consciousness (mainly because he apparently has connection-anxiety) is ridiculous.
Haidt, et al, are doing really important, interesting, compelling work showing that for all the utility smartphones provide, devices like this are doing literal cognitive and emotional damage to young people. A vast array of negative social markers from loneliness, depression, anxiety, and suicide all SURGING coincidental with widespread access to smart phones.
Certainly young people are more vulnerable, but to suggest older people aren't being harmed in similar (but likely less deformative) ways would be unlikely.
Smart phones are FANTASTICALLY USEFUL. No question. But I can speak for myself that a good chunk the broad breadth of knowledge I used to have in my mind I now have to look up (that could be senility, too). Who even knows their kids phone numbers anymore?
To insist that people who want to get off the smartphone ecosystem are somehow impaired or dysfunctional itself flies in the face of a growing body of research the other way 'round.
