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

Hello everyone, just before we start, I would like everyone to take out their

smartphone

s and show me right where it is in your hands please, and I'll take a picture of it because then what I do every time before I speak, okay. are you ready okay thank you now please put it in the deepest pocket you can okay I came here today to talk to you about an addiction that many of us share but usually ignore and I'm talking about

smartphone

addiction ago one year. Working for a startup, we developed an iPhone app that attempted to bring you the best videos from around the web.

We wanted people to be entertained, happy and excited during the day, but we also wanted to earn some money and with you that the best way to earn some money is if as many people as possible use the app for as many minutes a day, so I signed up for this workshop that was about how to get people hooked on your app. They showed us how to deal with negative emotions like Being lonely, bored or dissatisfied, you can use them as internal triggers and have people try your app and then stay there as long as possible in the middle of the workshop, something changed in me.

I lifted my head, looked around and saw 80 other people who share the same goal. I've gotten people hooked on their apps and I've started to feel uncomfortable and that's because I'm a smart phonetician so this is what my mornings used to be like waking up, turning off the alarm clock and then dealing with dozens of notifications what's up Facebook Instagram work email my boss's email my colleagues etc and then an hour later I find myself still in bed in my underwear in a very uncomfortable position my teeth are not brushed I haven't had a shower or coffee but what is going on so I decided I needed to change and I came up with this project and going digital is about raising awareness about smartphone addiction.

Then I started collecting some data. I wanted to see if other people have the same problems. I do and found that you need to do well, apparently for most of us the average user checks their smartphone at least 110 times a day and at Stanford they found that three quarters of students said they would rather forget about their wallet that they use their iPhone when they leave the house and the same thing around people say that they fall asleep with their phone, but it's not just about my phone and me, it's also a social thing, right. Pacific Bell Wireless, a large phone company in 1999, did a survey that asked people if they thought it was rude to use the phone in public.

More than 90% said that they thought it was very rude to use the phone in restaurants, at dinner, at the movies, in the classroom, where everyone else is, but now, 15 years later, it became so common that people use the phone with other people, we already have a special word for it, it's called sob, it's when you snob someone who sits next to you or in front of you or maybe even talks to you using your phone, so I wanted to know easily the real addiction, can we call it addiction because you could say that this is very useful?

Apparently there are some similarities between smartphone addiction and other addictions, for example, when a smoker smokes his cigarette, he feels stressed, he feels anxious. It's the same for an alcoholic who can't take his drink and apparently we feel stressed when we can't turn on our phone or when our battery is about to run out. You probably know this feeling and from research conducted in Australia among 3,000 minors. the age of 30, nine out of ten admit to filling this anxiety while the battery runs out, sorry, I have two amazing nephews, they are three and eight and as a technologist, I loved watching them grow up pinching, scrolling, swiping hitting the touchscreen even taking selfies before they knew how to read, but I also couldn't help but wonder if there is a cost to this and apparently there is.

There are multiple studies that show

relationship

s between children's development and the things that happen to our brains. Apparently, excessive use of screens can actually lead to loss of tissue volume in the gray matter areas of our brain, specifically in a place called the frontal lobe, this is a place where our processing functions happen, things like prioritizing planning and everything else we used to call we need to get things done. A different area affected is the insula, this is where the child learns to create empathy and compassion for others, but it's not just the child, what about the parents?

So at Boston Medical they went to observe some parents with their children at a fast food restaurant. restaurants in the united states They observed many families having dinner together and saw that many parents were looking at their phones while having dinner with their children. A third of them were constantly on the phone and what happened when a parent interrupted a parent glued to his phone? Usually, on his son's part, it was a negative reaction. I tried to understand why we are so addicted, what is happening to us and I found some more

relationship

s. Research found in the Harvard psychology department shows that sharing information about ourselves as 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 earning money. , eat food or even have sex and another thing is our fear of missing out, we are so afraid of missing out so use the Facebook newsfeed and Instagram use the newsfeed and Twitter to see what others are doing, but actually what we are is we are missing out on the real world reality of the US AVG study found that 57% of women would rather give up sex than use their smartphone for a week and In the UK, a different study shows that about the same percentage admitted that they check their smartphones well while having sex, this is because women can multitask at this time.

I also noticed that I no longer daydream. I don't daydream anymore because every free second I have I'm on my phone. I don't look out the window anymore. I no longer sit in the trees, but history is full of great achievers. Jai dreamers like Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton and we love to imagine how Newton said that either the tree or Einstein looked out the window and this is the moment when they had their best ideas and in fact we can see that they have to do a lot with the Creativity and daydreaming is not just about creativity, it is also about our memory.

Research found that to store long-term memories there is a two-step process; The first step, the brain takes the new impressions and stores them in a temporary location, but to take this and move it into 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 that I need to make a change. I need to start raising awareness and getting people talking about it, so I asked my friends what are the times in your life when you would rather put your phone down, would you rather put it aside, and then I took some photos of them.

I'll show them to you alone. Some examples of doing it with the phone off after five pictures I took, something overwhelming happened. My email started filling up with more than 500 photos in two weeks from other people who wanted to participate in the campaign and not only from Israel, but also from all over the world. Volunteers from all over the world came together and helped me and we started getting dozens of emails from people telling us incredible stories and the best story that I would never forget is one that an Australian guy told me, not this one, this Australian guy told me how was 14 years old. his daughter walks into the room and sees him and his wife looking at the smartphone, completely ignoring him and she tells them that mom is dead, this is so antisocial, so she decided from that moment that at bedtime dinner no one would use the phone for two hours and he texted me so excited about how our campaign really changed him.

The next thing I wanted to do is something about young children, so I teamed up with a navigator, she's a psychotherapist who works with children to create a book for kids addicted to screens, but it's not a book that's supposed to be scary. to kids or telling them not to use their smartphone or any screen anymore, it's a book to encourage them to go out and look at the world and see how amazing and beautiful the world is, for sure. Our biggest event was last March, which was day and night to unplug. A few years ago there was a new tradition in the USA.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, small groups started celebrating a day of unplugging for a year for 24 hours, we put the smartphone somewhere else and just enjoy the whatever there is. Cheynet, a good friend and partner in this project, decided we

should

get it. to Tel Aviv and make it the biggest event ever and we did it for two months. We want all of Tel Aviv to convince people to join us, but we didn't really have to convince the response was so good that we had yoga studios, cafes and the best bars in Tel Aviv didn't allow people entered their businesses with their smartphones that day.

They also missed the time when people really used to interact with each other. We learned a lot on the day we went offline. 24 hours is enough time for someone to get out of anxiety and really start connecting with real life again, but I have to say that if you think I'm anti-technology or anti-smartphone, you've misunderstood me. The smartphone is an amazing device, it is a magical device. I am in love with it not only as a device but also as a technologist and there are also amazing apps that are really positive and can help me develop habits like a diet, meditation, running, etc., and they are doing a lot of good for science, but said This, I still know that the changes we have seen in recent years are nothing compared to what we are going to face in the last or in the next decade or two.

Google Glass is starting to become really commercial and now cooperates with the popular glasses brand Ray Ban and Google have a patent pending which is that for a content lens you can actually use blinking and what about wearable technology, clothing, watches, This is the big trend, so eventually technology will be integrated into our physical bodies and our future may be even more hectic and less relaxed than what we do today unless we make a change and I don't want to talk about disconnecting I want to talk about a diet some apps remind me of junk food but other apps are like healthy organic food and how We become aware of what we eat, we need to be aware of what and how much we consume in the Western world, so many cases of diabetes and then we decided to start educating our children and ourselves about sugar balance, so why can't we do it? for the digital diet and it's up to you and me to start thinking about it and understand what this digital diet is going to be like, so let's start doing it today, thank you.