5 Tips on How to Stop Being a Digital Slave

Lifehack.org – a great collection of posts about how to improve our lives, wrote about UNDIGITIZE.ME.

Ohad Frankfurt explains:

Put your phone face-down.

I recently had the good fortune of discovering a fantastic project called undigitize.me. This project is a creation of a young entrepreneur who had enough. He wanted to focus on the things that mattered the most, mainly the people he encountered and his thoughts. One day he realized that the phone was his biggest obstacle.

So what does it mean to put your phone face-down? It means that you are preventing your mobile device from capturing your attention every time you receive an email, message, or any other stream of information. It’s not just a statement; it’s a way of life. Keeping your phone face-down means that you are trying to normalize the way you think and act, it means that once again you are in control of your time and focus and will not let any app or service control you.

Read more here.

South Korean doctors warn smartphones cause ‘digital dementia’

South Korean doctors have found that increasing use of smartphones among young Koreans has led to a surge in incidence of “digital dementia” characterized by deterioration of cognitive abilities and symptoms found in people who have suffered head injury.

…heavy reliance on smartphones creates an imbalance in brain development which leads to the left side of the brain becoming overstimulated while the right side suffers and becomes relatively stunted. Heavy use of smartphones engages the left brain at the expense of the right, leading to deterioration of right side-leaning cognitive abilities and symptoms of “digital dementia,” which include loss of memory, short attention span and problems regulating emotion.

Gi-won said: “Heavy [technology] users are likely to develop the left side of their brains, leaving the right side untapped or underdeveloped.”

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/353047#ixzz2XhO0v21y

Smartphones Induce Dumb Behaviour

In this nice blog post from the Bangkok Post, Sukhumaporn Laiyok is writing her opinion about Smartphone addiction.

One of her stories in that post really caught my eyes:

People find it hard to tear themselves away from these little gizmos. The other day I saw a woman using her smartphone when exercising. As she was working out on a treadmill she used one hand to hold the…

Wherever you are in the world – New York, Tel-Aviv or Bangkok – people see the same sights, and feel the same about the Smartphone Addiction.

 

// Lior Frenkel