Thread by @Telegraph

📱Over the 15 years since its launch, the iPhone has changed our everyday lives and provided the keys to our most intimate selves

@iododds finds out what using these devices for over a decade has done to our brains 👇
telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/u…

Psychologist Larry Rosen has worked on eight studies of smartphone use among young people, between 2012 and 2020.

📱He sees compulsive tapping and swiping in everyone from toddlers through nonagenarians to police officers directing traffic

🧠He believes that for many people smartphones either produce or exacerbate symptoms similar to those of psychological disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or attention deficit disorder

📱Rosen also cites ‘nomophobia’ – a portmanteau of ‘no more phone phobia’, meaning the unease we feel when our phone is far from our bodies

👉Psychologist Gloria Mark even describes our phones as appendages, suggesting they are in some sense now part of our bodies

telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/u…

📉‘Attention spans are short, crazily short, and they’ve been declining,’ says Mark

Some distractions are external, such as a phone call or a message

But about half are ‘self-interruptions’, where ‘something inside of yourself compels you to interrupt what you’re doing’

Apple’s home screen – with all your apps visible in a dense grid – gives you 28 reasons to be distracted on every screen (or 252 if you make every icon a folder of other icons)

‘I won’t say it encourages you, it makes you do it,’ says Rosen

📱Almost every smartphone now has these features.

Still, to Mark and Rosen, these are the fruits of Apple’s quest to make everything on iPhone feel fast and delightful, which shaped a whole industry in its image.

Gloria Mark points out how much of our phone use is reinforced, even mandated, by social conventions:

📩 From the expectation that we’ll check emails throughout the day...

💬 To the common practice of googling to answer someone’s question during conversation

"In recent years, Apple seems to have become uneasy with its crown" writes @iododds

Having spent the past decade and a half making so many people so thoroughly dependent on its devices, Apple now faces a perhaps even bigger challenge: taming the forces it unleashed

Read the full long read here 👇
telegraph.co.uk/technology/0/u…