Discussion: Spending time on smartphones

In this part, you are invited to write a short article for the online magazine Future and Technology in which you discuss whether or not people spend too much time on their smartphones.

When you write your article, we advise you to look at the different attitudes to smartphones expressed in the three texts in your source material. As you have seen, the three texts explore the idea that people are sometimes negatively affected by using their smartphones. On the other hand, the texts also suggest that there are some positive sides of smartphones, and that this piece of technology has become so deeply rooted in our modern lives that we cannot imagine living without it.

According to the author of Text I, “You Probably Use Your Smartphone Way More Than You Think”, people spend a lot of their time using their smartphones. According to a study, “young adults use their smartphones roughly twice as much as they estimate that they do” (ll. 7-9), coming to “an average of five hours a day” (l. 12). The results of the study have revealed that young adults are generally unaware of how much time they spend on their smartphones, often doing nothing in particular: “The researchers also found that more than half of the smartphone use – 55 percent – consisted of short bursts of less than 30 seconds of activity, which, as Andrews suggests, may be a sort of habitual behavior for many users.” (ll. 56-61)

Text I also shows that over-usage of smartphones “can impair attention, productivity and memory, dampen creative thinking, increase stress levels, reduce sleep quality and lead to “cognitive errors” like forgetting meetings and walking into people” (ll. 84—89).

According to the author of Text II, “What Happened When I Gave Up My Smartphone for A Week”, people spend a lot of time on their smartphones because of their need to feel connected. After giving up...