Phones used to connect us. Now, they exclude

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Phubbing is a new word for a new anti-social act. To phub is to “phone-snub”. 

Smartphones, you must know, are instruments of exclusion, antithetical to the prototypical telephone, which was created as an instrument of inclusion.

The telephone brings a voice from far, far away into your home, and directly to your ear at the very moment of speaking. In the words of Thomas Alva Edison, the telephone “annihilated time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch”.

Despite its name, the smartphone is less a phone than it is a portable computer.

“People,..have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets.” ...smartphones have resulted in “the death of proximity”.

In Singapore today, there are about two million landline phones, 77 per cent of which are in homes. In comparison, in June 2023, there were 9,827,200 mobile phone subscriptions.

Qn: ‘The quality of human interaction is diminished by modern communication devices.’ How far do you agree? (Cam. 2023)