Neil McNicholas: Don’t go totally daft for a smartphone

It’s certainly noticeable that you can be sitting chatting with friends and a question will arise about some tit-bit of information or knowledge that no-one seems able to come up with and immediately someone will produce a smartphone and Google the answer.

In that sense, the ease of access to information provided by these pocket-size pieces of technology can’t be faulted. What does set you thinking is when someone asks what did we do before smartphones came along? Often there isn’t much of an answer because, as time passes, more and more people will have been born after this technology was developed.

As I said, I don’t have a smartphone, but I do a great deal of online research on my laptop. The one thing I think we always have to be careful of, whatever our chosen technology, is the source – and therefore the accuracy and reliability – of the information we glean from it.

People don’t seem to question the sources and resources they find via their search engines, and some of it is notoriously iffy. At least with a book you can check on the author, their background, their qualifications and their right to set themselves up as an expert in a particular field. You can’t always do that with something like Wikipedia – which people seem to trust implicitly as a source of all knowledge, though without any reassurance that everything they read there is true.

And in this world of online research, are our children losing the ability to do reference work from books? There is actually something very satisfying about being surrounded by piles of books that we can delve into and cross-reference in our search for information. The smartphone in the palm of our hand doesn’t quite offer the same sense of satisfaction nor the same assurance.

Consider also sat nav. Some have come to rely on it to such an extent that they have lost the ability to map-read, to find their way from A to B by geographical features and road names, and so we find drivers ending up in cul-de-sacs and up farm tracks when simply looking out of their car window would have told them their gizmo didn’t have a clue.

I suppose the one smartphone function people find most helpful is the diary facility and the reminder it provides of engagements and appointments. The only problem is it doesn’t help us train our memory to be a little sharper, and if we ever lose the data, or our phone, then we are up the same creek as the sat-nav users.

My hi-tech approach to dealing with my own questionable memory is to leave pieces of paper all over the place to remind me of the things I need to remember. This too fails to train the memory and so I may soon have to leave back-up pieces of paper to remind me to read the notes reminding me not to forget!

And I suppose that is the point those Canadian psychologists were making – that the more we rely on the functions of our smartphones, the less reliable may be our own functioning. It is one of those “use it or lose it” things. And on those occasions when everything goes pear-shaped as a result, it won’t be very satisfying shouting abuse at the gadget in our hand when the blame really lies with ourselves and the gadget in our head.

Having said all of that, the thing that constantly concerns me is the “Borg factor”. The Borg (from the TV series Star Trek) is an alien race set on conquering the universe by assimilating all other species into their Collective. Its members are part of a single consciousness, linked by bio-chips implanted in their brains tuned only to the thousands of voices of the Collective. Sound familiar?

The “Borg on earth” can be identified walking along the street with one arm held in front of them at a jaunty angle holding their smartphones, and apparently talking to themselves but presumably to other members of their Collective. These social networks have helped members redefine the word “friend” to mean people they have never met in their life and about whom they know nothing, but with whom they will share every intimate detail of their life without hesitation. And we won’t even go into what the “twittersphere” has done to the social glue of language and grammar.

The unanswered question is: are smartphones “on charge” or “in charge”?

Father Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Yarm.