According to a survey by Reviews.org we are glued to our phones all day, every day.
Check out these alarming stats:
A whopping 71% of people check their phone within the first 10 minutes of waking up.
Leaving your phone at home is a BIG no-no for many people. To some it’s like losing a limb! A staggering 45% of individuals even consider their phone to be their most valuable possession.
But wait, it gets crazier! More than half of the respondents claimed that if their house were to catch fire, their phone would be the FIRST thing they’d save.
So, how attached are YOU to your phone?
What do you guys think of these stats?
I’m not surprised at these results at all. Smartphones offer a combination of convenience, social connectivity, and instant gratification that can be addictive for some people. They are designed to be this way. It’s part of the attention economy.
Well… if you end up in the middle of a crisis and need information and updates about the situation, grabbing your smart phone is a quite sensible thing to do.
But, the internal process of prioritization is obviously not based on rationality here, more of a “muscle memory” reaction, driven by a behavior of deeply rooted habits and mechanisms.
At least people are honest about it.
Like a few others have mentioned, it’s because of how they were designed, I guess. Or if not how the phones were designed (Steve Jobs only wanted the iPhone in particular to be a phone that can also play music), the applications that run on them are designed.
I’m surprised though that a lot of smartphone users would grab their phones in the event of a fire – if they’re worried about losing information (this sounds to me like the 80s/90s equivalent of how a lot of people used to say they’d grab their photo albums in a fire) – isn’t it all backed up in the cloud? Unless I needed to call/text someone, it’d be the last thing on my mind with it all being backed up!
– in portrait mode, of course, because users are recording for how they like to hold their cellphones, not for display later on computer and TV screens
I think it’s somewhat reasonable to grab the Smartphone first, because most of the time it’s near you and you’ve got all important information on the phone - Banking, Medications, Appointments… Literally Everything. You also need it to call for Emergency and to ask Friends and Family for help.
But I think the sad Part is that our Smartphones became these Devices. That Everything is stored in this Brick. I don’t remember the study but Most people would rather take an interrogation and lie detector test than letting someone browse their Smartphone. And in this context it makes sense.
I’m using my Mudita as my main and only phone for almost a Month now. Before that I used a “Dumb Nokia Phone” for two Months. Letting go of the Smartphone was also letting go of many conveniences. But I would rather phrase it this way: Is this Convenience really Necessary, Important or worth the Risks?
For me it was a big No. I still have an iPhone, without Sim-Card. It always stays at home and I only use it if I have to (Two Factor Authentification for Example). And it’s exactly here that I noticed that our civilazation has become obsessed with Smartphones. I can’t do it without my phone.
And this is the biggest Problem in my Opinion. Smartphones get Essential Features even for Work-related Environments. If the Trend continues this way, choosing not to have a Smartphone will be impossible. Having Conveniences or not is one thing. But having Essentials locked behind Smartphones is really what we need to avoid.
You’ve got a point there. If it’s not recorded it didn’t happen LOL