Murphy’s descriptions of modern life are acute. The dubious precision of much of this research is slightly irritating and makes you question the methodology, but clearly something has changed, and no one can really dispute the argument that our affection for our phones is eating into the time that we might previously have spent listening to the people to whom we are closest. A study conducted by Microsoft found that since the year 2000, the average attention span dropped from 12 to eight seconds. Thirteen-year-olds who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of clinical depression by 27% and are 56% more likely to say they are unhappy than their peers who spend less time on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. Feeling lonely affects your health as much as being an alcoholic or smoking 14 cigarettes a day, she notes.
In a 2018 survey of 20,000 Americans, almost half said they did not have meaningful in-person social interactions meanwhile American life expectancy is declining due to suicide, opioid addiction, alcoholism and other so-called diseases of distress often associated with loneliness. Over the past century, she asserts, the average amount of time people have devoted to listening to one another during their waking hours has gone down by almost half, from 42% to 24%. Like smokers and cigarettes, people get jittery without their phones.”ĭoes this matter? Murphy argues that it does, profoundly, and draws together a barrage of statistics and research to persuade us that we have unthinkingly descended into a dystopian reality. Now “people just as reflexively reach for their phones. Or if they are talking to one another, the phone is on the table as ifa part of the place setting, taken up at intervals as casually as a knife or fork, implicitly signalling that the present company is not sufficiently engaging.” There was a time when, during idle or anxious moments, people reached for a cigarette, she writes. “At cafes, restaurants and family dinner tables, rather than talking to one another, people look at their phones. She sets out the problem in painstaking, depressing detail. This is among the subjects Kate Murphy analyses in You’re Not Listening. Fifteen years later, the preference for phones over humans no longer seems in the least remarkable. I found their behaviour fascinating and peculiar. He was with a glamorous woman but they weren’t speaking instead they spent the whole evening looking at their phones.
A month or so later, I sat near the Indian politician Rahul Gandhi in a restaurant. I n 2005 I sat opposite someone at a dinner party who spent much of the evening looking at her phone under the table, sending messages and smiling to herself.
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