Tagged: smartphones

boy with phone on cement stairs

Placemaking / Smartphones / Social Media / Urban Design

Don’t Blame Your Teen’s Smartphone, Blame Their Neighborhood

“These days teenagers just stare at those damned smartphones all day instead of hanging out in the real world and actually living. Such a shame.”  Surely, you’ve heard or said some variation of this statement. It’s a common one. Countless articles, blog posts, books and research papers have been written with the direct or indirect intention of demonizing smartphones as an addictive technology rotting the minds of the young generations. I should know, I am...

Doors and Opportunities

Placemaking / Smartphones / Social Media / Urban Design / Video Games

The Relationship Between “Tech Addiction” and Urban Design

Over these past few years, there has been a lot of talk about smartphone and social media addiction. People spend hours a day with their faces staring at screens, leading to concerns about what they are missing out on while doing so. The target of this concern is often young people, with adults who grew up without such technologies criticizing them for staring at their devices instead of engaging with the real world. However, what...

mwc 2018

Artificial Intelligence / Innovation

Insights from the Mobile World Congress 2018

A few weeks ago I attended the Mobile World Congress – one of the biggest tech conferences in the world.  I was interested to see what’s hot in tech now and I wanted to get some insights on the direction that technology is heading and how that technology may interact with and affect its human users.  Below I’ll talk about some of my observations and then mention a couple of the things which I simply...

social media icons on a smartphone screen

Smartphones

What your Smartphone Use Might be Saying About You

Smartphone Behaviors and the Psychological Problem they are Most Associated With   Sometimes the literature on the subject of social media, the Internet and smartphones tends to address each of these things as a single problematic entity.  You’ve probably heard warnings about “smartphone addiction” or “social media obsession” more than once from the news media, from your grandmother, etc.  However, the Internet and the smartphone are just channels through which we access a world of...

cyborg robot girl with computers and data

Cyborgs

You are a Cyborg

I am willing to bet that 95% of you reading this have your smartphone within arm’s reach or in your hand at this very moment.  Only 10 years ago, hardly anyone owned a smartphone, and today, 2.3 billion people have one or more of these multi-functional handheld devices.  And we don’t only own them; we are so connected to our smartphones in so many ways that some might say we have functionally merged with them,...