Why we should rethink our relationship with the smartphone | Lior Frenkel | TEDxBG

hi everyone just before I start I'd like all of you to take your smartphones and show it to me right where is it in your hands please and I will take a picture of that because then what I do every time before I speak okay are you ready okay thank you now please put it the deepest pocket you can okay I came here today to talk to you about an addiction one that many of us share but we usually ignore and I'm speaking about the smartphone addiction a year ago I was working for a start-up we developed an iPhone application who tried to get you the best videos from all around the web we wanted to make people entertained and happy and excited during the day but we also wanted to make some money and with you that the best way to make some money is if as many people as possible will use the application for as many minutes a day so I signed up for this workshop which was all about how to get people hooked to your app they showed us how with negative emotions like being lonely or bored or dissatisfied you can use them as internal triggers and get people try your app and then stay there for as long as possible in the middle of the workshop something changed in me I raise my head I looked around me and I saw 80 other people sharing the same goal I have get people hooked to their apps and I started to feel uncomfortable and that was because me I am smart phonetic myself so this is how my mornings used to look like waking up turning off the alarm clock and then dealing with dozens of notifications what's up Facebook Instagram email working email from my boss my colleagues etc and then an hour later I find myself still in bed in my boxer shorts in a very uncomfortable posture my teeth are not brushed I didn't have a shower or coffee yet what is going on so I decided I need to change and I came up with this project and digitize me is all about raising awareness to smartphone addiction I then started to collect some data I wanted to see if other people have the same problems like I do and I found that it need they do well apparently most of us well the average user is checking his smartphone at least 110 times a day and in Stanford they found out the three-quarters of the students said they would rather forget their wallet than their iPhone when they go out of the home and the same around of people said they are falling asleep with their phone but it's not just about me and my phone it's also a social thing right Pacific Bell Wireless a big phone company back in 1999 did a survey they asked people if they find it rude to use phone in public more than 90% said they find it really rude to use the phone in restaurants at the dinner at the movies in the classroom well where everyone else is but now 15 years later it became so common for people to use the phone around others we already have a special word for it it's called sobbing it's when you snob someone who sits next to you or in front of you or maybe even talking to you by using your phone so I wanted to know easy the real addiction can we call it an addiction because you could say this is just a lot of use apparently there are some similarities between the smartphone addiction to other addictions for example when a smoker can get his cigarette he feels stressful he feels anxious it's the same for an alcoholic who can't get his drink and apparently we feel stressed when we can't get our phone on or when our battery is about to die you probably know this feeling and a research done in Australia among 3000 people under the age of 30 founded nine out of every ten admit to fill this anxiety while having his battery dying so sorry I have two amazing nephews they are three and eight years old and as a technologist I loved watching them growing pinching scrolling swiping hitting the touchscreen even taking selfies before they knew how to read but I also couldn't help to wonder is there a cost to it and apparently there is there are multiple studies showing relations between development of kids and things who happen to our brain apparently overuse of screens can really lead to loss of tissue volume in the gray matter areas in our brains specifically in in a place called the front lobe this is a place where our processing functions happen things like prioritizing planning and everything else we used to call we need it for get things done a different area affected is the insula this is where the kid is learning how to create empathy and compassion for others but it's not just the kid right what about the parents so in Boston Medical they went to observe some parents with their kids in fast-food restaurants in the u.s. they watch a lot of families eating dinner together and they saw that so many parents are looking at their phone while dining with their kids one third of them was constantly on the phone and what happened when a parent glued to his phone was interrupted by a kid by his kid usually it was a negative reaction I tried to understand why are we so addicted what is going on with us and I found some more relations one research found in Harvard psychology department is showing the sharing information about ourselves like we like to do through the smartphone activates the same part in our brain that is related to pleasure the same pleasure we get from getting money eating food or even having sex and another thing is our fear to miss out we're so afraid we're missing out so use the Facebook newsfeed and the Instagram use newsfeed and Twitter to see what others are doing but actually what we are is we are missing out on the real world on reality AVG study from the u.s. discovered that 57% of women would rather give up sex than they are smartphone for a week and in the UK a different study shows that around the same percentage admitted they are checking their smartphones while having sex well this is because women can multitask right now I also noticed that I don't daydream anymore I don't daydream because in every spare second I'm on my phone I don't look out at the window anymore I don't sit on the trees but history is full of high achievers Jai dreamers like Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton and we so love to imagine how Newton said either the tree or Einstein looked out of the window and this is the moment where they had their best ideas and indeed we can see that it is has to do a lot with creativity and daydreaming is not just about creativity it's also about our memory research found that in order to store memories into long-term memories there is a two-step process in the first step the brain is taking the new impressions and store it in a temporal place but then in order to take this and move it to a long-term memory we need to let our brain rest and this is what we do when we daydream learning all these studies made me really think I need to make a change I need to start raise awareness and make people speak about it so I asked my friends what are the moments in your life you would rather put your phone down you would rather put it aside and then I take few pictures of them I'll show you just few examples doing it with your phone turned down after five pictures I took something overwhelming happened my email started to fill up with more than 500 photos within two weeks of other people wanting to participate in the campaign and not just from Israel also from all around the world volunteers joined and helped me and we started to get dozens of emails of people telling us amazing stories and the best story I would never forget is one that I got from an Australian guy not this one this Australian guy told me how his 14 years old daughter is getting in the room seeing him and his wife looking at the smartphone totally ignoring him and she tells them mom dead this is so unsocial well so he decided from then on that in dinner time no one is using the phone for two hours and he wrote me so excited how our campaign really changed him the next thing I wanted to do is something about the little kids so I partnered with a navigator she is a psychotherapist working with kids to create a book for kids who are addicted to the screens but it's not a book who is supposed to scare the kids or tell them to not use the smartphone's anymore or any screen it's a book to encourage them to go out and look at the world and see how amazing and beautiful the world is out there well for sure our biggest event was on last March that was the day and night of unplugging a few years ago there was a new tradition in the u.s. San Francisco Los Angeles New York small groups started to celebrate one day of unplugging for a year for 24 hours we put the smartphone somewhere else and we just enjoy whatever there is cheynet were a good friend and a partner in this project decided we must get it to Tel Aviv and make it the biggest event ever and so we did for two months we want all over Tel Aviv convincing people to join us but actually we didn't have to convince the feedback was so good we had yoga studios coffee shops and the best bars in Tel Aviv not allowing people to get with their smartphones inside their businesses that day they also missed the time when people really actually used to engage with each other we learned a lot in the day of unplugging 24 hours is enough time for someone to get out of the anxiety and really start to connect back to real life but I must say if you think I'm against technology or against the smartphone you didn't get me right the smartphone is an amazing device it's a magical device I'm in love with it not just as the device also as a technologist and there are also amazing applications who are really positive they can help me grow habits like a diet meditation running and so on and it's doing so much good to science but having said that we still know that the changes we've seen in the last few years are nothing compared to what we are going to face in the last or in the next decade or two we're facing Google glass get starting to get really commercial now cooperating with the popular eyewear brand Ray Ban and Google has a patent pending which is that for a Content lens you can really use by blinking and what about wearable technology clothes watches this is the big trend so eventually technology will be embedded in our physical bodies and our future can be even more hectic and less relaxed than what we do today unless we make a change and I do not want to speak about unplugging I want to speak about a diet some apps remind me junk food but other applications are like healthy organic food and just like we became aware to what we eat we need to become aware to what and how much we consume the Western world so many cases of diabetes and then we decided to start educating our kids and ourselves about sugar balance right so why can't we do it for the digital diet and it's up to me and you to start thinking about it and understand how this digital diet is about to look like so let's start doing today thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 377,255

Keywords: Social Media, English, Health, ted talks, ted talk, tedx, tedx talks, Culture, ted x, Psychology, tedx talk, TEDxTalks, ted, Bulgaria, Technology

Id: Pgo65s1R6TM

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 20 2014