Hey look, they're very useful tools and no I don't want to give mine up. But let's face it, at any given time and location about 1/3 of the people there are buried in their phones. And since they don't look up often they're causing car accidents, pedestrian and bike accidents, etc. It's turned social locations like bars or sporting arena events into semi-antisocial events. It's ushered in the era of the selfie with the most vain among us taking and posting their photos incessantly. It's made us addicted to short news sources (often dubious) which fan the flames of extreme positions and conspiracy theories and somehow convinced us that reading all that tripe makes us well informed. And in some workplaces it has turned once vibrant work communities into quiet shells while everybody is either away ("working from home" - not) or buried in BOTH computer and cell (it used to be people would get up from their computer once in a while and interact, now when you get off your computer you just get on your smartphone).

Consider this. For decades TV was considered the "idiot box". Well I submit to you that the smartphone has taken its place. People spend far more of their day doing things on their phone than they ever did sitting in one place watching TV.

I have only just recently begun to use a 'smart phone' and I see the appeal of it but by god they really do make people some some stupid things. And it's not the phones, it's the people, I know, but for some reason the moment they bury their noses in the screens of their phones the IQ drops by about 50%. I've seen people walk out in the middle of a busy road without looking up from the phone, I have seen people crash into poles, I am pretty sure I saw a guy break his privates when he jammed his crotch on a pillar that was just high enough to get him at the entrance of a store. He was on the ground for a while. All because they are so interested in what's on their phone they forget that life is going on around them. People can be so stupid, so easily.