The Internet tells me that warnings started appearing on tobacco products in 1966. I smoked until 1976 and I don’t remember them. They weren’t called Black Box Warnings till 1979 and then it might have started with some prescription drugs. Well, in my mind the Smartphone should come with one.
I was complimenting a retired pastor about 10 years older than I on his ability to use his iPad and phone. He taps and scrolls and finds and looks all during Bible class based on what the pastor is teaching. He converses with other on the news from YouTube. I told him how I didn’t own a smartphone and used only minimal tech. He looked at me and with unfeigned seriousness said, “Don’t start. Don’t!” Regardless of their age from 20s to 70s, every single person I’ve made my lament to in the past 20 years has said exactly that.
During my lifetime the only two ubiquitous things I can recall are smoking in the 60s to the mid-70s and smartphones today. No matter where you looked in those days of yesteryear, no matter the time, place, or situation most people were smoking. Walking, talking, drinking, sitting they were smoking. Now everywhere you look time, place, situation notwithstanding, they are on their smartphones.
Those smoking were present right then and there with you. Those engaged in smartphoning are somewhere else with someone else. Smoking was by and large a social activity. Even today, if you find a smoking lounge in an airport or even the purposely seedy outside place “you may smoke”, there is socializing going on. Stigmatized individuals tend to band together. So if smoking is social that doesn’t make smartphoning automatically antisocial, but is definitely makes them outside of the society they’re around right there and then.
You will have no trouble finding articles, and some from reputable sources, warning of the harm or even danger of smartphones. They first focused on the physical fact that people are not looking where they are going and hurting themselves or others. Now these warnings have a more somber cast about them. Everyone knows you can’t put genies back in bottles, and everyone knows genies out of the bottle tend to put the “owner” in one.
Smoking is deemed deadly to physical health and you dare not do it at all let alone in public, in restaurants, around schools, playgrounds, or swimming pools. Smartphoning ought to be regarded as at least damaging to mental, emotional, educational, and certainly to social health. Nope, in the same way a triple burger consisting of triple cheese, triple meat, and triple bacon is never going to come with a Black Box Label, smartphones won’t either.
“Don’t start. Don’t!” might be all it would take. Too simplistic? Hey, if Nancy Reagan could think the way to stop drug use in the 80s was “Just Say No”, I can think someone will be stopped from the perils of smartphones by someone they respect forcefully saying just, “Don’t!”
