Phones are Portable Prisons…

Nearly every person has a smart phone. They have become integral to modern life in a way few other inventions can match. The utility provided by them is truly astounding, and because of this we really do carry the world in our hands. However, this has come at a cost. These phones can easily act as portable prisons, incarcerating the user in bars of mindless scrolling.

The use of phones has increased steadily for years. In fact, it has grown about 31% from the end of last year. This by itself is not really a problem. Phones have become a new way of interacting with the world, and many of these interactions are positive. However, there are a great many that are not as great for the user. One example of this is doom scrolling. This entails continuously reading negative articles or posts on any social media until the mind of the user is either completely fried or so egregiously full of whatever negative chemical the brain can create. Becoming nihilistic, melancholic, and being unable to stop are all byproducts of this harmful practice too. It is interesting; the sheer amount of information causes a bevy of problems, especially when that information creates a negative response from the one who reads it. There are issues with too much content even if it ‘positive,’ though.

Short form content has proliferated almost every social media app. Whether it be YouTube with YouTube shorts, Instagram with its staggering amount posts, or the incredibly popular TikTok, it can be so easy to fall down a rabbit hole of constant mindless scrolling. These apps prey on the addictiveness of short content that requires almost no investment from the user. Most people find it easier to begin watching an episode of a show than sitting down to watch a two-hour movie. Personally, I find this to be because of the time investment that both options require. It is much easier to justify watching a twenty-minute episode because it is only twenty minutes. A movie requires at least four times that. Nevertheless, I end up wasting more time watching shows than I do movies because each separate decision is incredibly easy to make, and it slowly matches and eventually exceeds the time of the movie. Short-form content is exactly the same. Hours can quickly expire because the simple decision of flicking a thumb upward requires nothing but gives the user just a little more than nothing. It often feels as though many people become prisoners of this action, and phones making this content portable has kept people glued to the bright screens for a much longer time than is reasonable.