The people deciding to ditch their smartphones

 In a world where many of us are glued to our smartphones, Dulcie Cowling is something of an anomaly - she has ditched hers.

The 36-year-old decided at the end of last year that getting rid of her handset would improve her mental health. So, over Christmas she told her family and friends that she was switching to an old Nokia phone that could only make and receive calls and text messages.

She recalls that one of the pivotal moments that led to her decision was a day at the park with her two boys, aged six and three: "I was on my mobile at a playground with the kids and I looked up and every single parent - there was up to 20 - were looking at their phones, just scrolling away," she says.

"I thought 'when did this happen?'. Everyone is missing out on real life. I don't think you get to your death bed and think you should have spent more time on Twitter, or reading articles online."

Ms Cowling, who is a creative director at London-based advertising agency Hell Yeah!, adds that the idea to abandon her smartphone had built up during the Covid lockdowns.

"I thought about how much of my life is spent looking at the phone and what else could I do. Being constantly connected to lots of services creates a lot of distractions, and is a lot for the brain to process."

One study suggests we spend almost five hours a day on our smartphones. Getty Images

She plans to use the time gained from quitting her smartphone to read and sleep more.

About nine out of 10 people in the UK now own a smartphone, a figure broadly replicated across the developed world. And we are glued to them - one recent study found that the average person spends 4.8 hours a day on their handset.

Yet for a small, but growing number of people, enough is enough.

Alex Dunedin binned his smartphone two years ago. "Culturally we have become addicted to these tools," says the educational researcher and technology expert. "They are blunting cognition and impeding productivity."

Mr Dunedin, who lives and works in Scotland, says another reason behind his decision was environmental concerns. "We are wasting exponential amounts of energy producing exponential amounts of CO2 emissions," he says.

He has become happier and more productive since he stopped using a smartphone, he says. Mr Dunedin doesn't even have an old-fashioned mobile phone or even a landline anymore. He is instead only electronically contactable via emails to his home computer.

"It has improved my life," he says. "My thoughts are freed up from constantly being cognitively connected to a machine that I need to feed with energy and money. I think that the danger of technologies is that they are emptying our lives."

Lynne Voyce, a 53-year-old teacher and writer from Birmingham, has moved in the opposite direction - she started using a smartphone again last August after a break of six years.

She says she was reluctantly compelled to buy one again due to having to deal with QR codes in restaurants, and so-called Covid passports, plus making it easier to keep in touch with one of her daughters who lives in Paris.

But she plans to give up it up again, if she can. "After the pandemic, and when Ella [her eldest daughter] isn't living abroad, I might try and give it up again. It sounds like an addiction, doesn't it?"

When Ms Voyce first abandoned her smartphone back in 2016 it was to help encourage her daughters to reduce the time they spent on their handsets.

"They were glued to their phones. I thought the only way to stop it was to get rid of my own phone. And it made all the difference.

"For example, we'd got to a restaurant, and they would no longer see me pick up my phone."

Not having a smartphone "took a lot of pressure off my brain" she says, "I didn't feel like I had to instantly answer things or be available when out".

Yet, while some worry about how much time they spend on their handset, for millions of others they are a godsend.

"More than ever, access to healthcare, education, social services and often to our friends and family is digital, and the smartphone is an essential lifeline for people," says a spokesperson for UK mobile network Vodafone.

"We also create resources to help people get the most from their tech, as well as to stay safe when they're online - that's hugely important."

However, Hilda Burke, a psychotherapist and author of The Phone Addiction Workbook, says there is a strong link between heavy device usage and relationship issues, quality of sleep, our ability to switch off and relax, and concentration levels.

"Many people have a constant drip feed of requests coming their way via their device, many with a false sense of urgency.

"They feel unable to lay boundaries down, with the result that they feel compelled to check their emails and messages last thing at night and first thing in the morning."

If getting rid of your smartphone seems too much but you are concerned that you spend too much time on it, there are other measures you can take to reduce your usage.

While it might initially seem counterintuitive, more apps are emerging to curtail mindless scrolling.

For example, Freedom lets you temporarily block apps and websites so you can focus more. And Off The Grid enables you to block off your phone for a certain time period.

Ms Burke says it would be useful if more people monitored how much time they spend on their smartphone. "Starting to realise exactly how much time you're frittering away each day on your phone can be a powerful wake-up call and catalyst for change."

She also advises carving out short periods when you have your phone switched off or left at home, and gradually increase the wait period till you check it again.

Finally, she recommends choosing an image or a word that represents what you would rather be doing - if only you had more time - as your phone's screensaver.

"Considering most of us check our phones 55 times per day and some of us even 100 times, this is a great visual reminder of a more valuable way to spend your precious time," she says.

(Source: BBC)

'UK faces mobile blackouts if Huawei 5G ban imposed by 2023'

BT and Vodafone have said their UK customers would face mobile phone signal blackouts if they are given three years or less to strip Huawei's equipment out of their 5G networks.

Executives from the network providers told MPs that they wanted at least five years, and ideally seven, if such an order were made.

The government is expected to announce new curbs on the use of the Chinese firm's kit within the next two weeks.

Huawei has urged it to take more time.

Getty Images

"There isn't a burning bridge," said Huawei's UK vice president Jeremy Thompson, adding that it was too soon to determine what impact new US sanctions would have.

The company also denied claims it would ever act against its clients' interests, even if told to do so by the Chinese government.

The Science and Technology Committee hearing represents a last chance for companies to make their cases before government ahead of a decision being taken.

'No signal'

In January, the government put a cap on Huawei's 5G market share, but decided that suggested security risks raised by allowing the Chinese firm to supply the country's telecoms providers could be managed.

Since then, however, Washington has announced fresh sanctions designed to prevent the company from having its own chips manufactured.

As a consequence, Huawei faces having to source other companies' chips for use in its equipment.

GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre is believed to have told the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport that this means it can no longer assure the security of Huawei's products.

Testimony was given via video link because of the coronavirus pandemic. Parliament TV

While it now seems likely the government will opt for a ban of some sort, the question is when it will come into effect.

Some Tory backbenchers are urging a deadline to be set before the 2024 general election - and there has been speculation that it could be as soon as 2023.

But Vodafone and BT - which both use Huawei's products in their networks - said this would be hugely disruptive.

"To get to zero in a three-year period would literally mean blackouts for customers on 4G and 2G, as well as 5G, throughout the country," said Howard Watson, BT's chief technology and information officer.

He explained the logistics involved in bringing in cranes and shutting off streets to replace masts, base stations and other Huawei equipment meant that the only way to meet the timespan would be to switch over multiple sites in an area at the same time.

3G signals would not be affected as the EE network uses Nokia kit to provide that service.

Vodafone made a similar case - it uses Huawei's kit in its 2G, 3G. 4G and 5G networks.

"[Customers] would lose their signal, sometimes for a couple of days, depending on how big or how intrusive the work to be carried out is," said Andrea Dona, Vodafone UK's head of networks.

"I would say a five-year transition time would be the minimum."

Mr Watson added: "A minimum of five years, ideally seven."

Replacing Huawei's 5G equipment will often involve simultaneously swapping out its 4G base stations and antennas. Getty Images

'Few more weeks'

Earlier in the hearing, Huawei made the case that it was too soon to decide on any new restrictions.

Executives said that the US had yet to confirm some of the details about the sanctions, adding they would subsequently need time to see if they could mitigate the impact.

The company has built up stockpiles of its chips, and believes it could keep providing equipment based on them for some time to come.

"We can supply our customers with their orders and support the existing network with spares," said Mr Thompson.

"And in terms of who the alternative [chip] suppliers are, they're not just Chinese. There are European companies who are also in this space.

"We will be able to share those [details] with you, but that will take a few more weeks."

A spokeswoman for DCMS said she could not reveal whether the department had already handed over its recommendations to the prime minister.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to convene a meeting of the National Security Council within the coming days to discuss the possibility of a ban, which could also extend to the country's broadband infrastructure.

Analysis by Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology correspondent

The warnings from Vodafone and BT about disruption to customers if Huawei is removed swiftly sound stark - but, in fact, both firms have softened their stance.

Last year they seemed determined to battle against any plan to exclude Huawei from the UK's 5G networks.

Now they seem resigned to the fact that this is going to happen.

Indeed, BT accepts that the threatened US sanctions could mean that within a couple of years, it won't be able to get hold of reliable Huawei equipment.

Their emphasis now is on timing - they want to make sure the government does not proceed as rapidly as many Conservative backbenchers would like in stripping out the Chinese firms' kit.

They understand how the political mood has changed, but will be warning ministers that disrupting mobile reception, or abandoning the target to get gigabit broadband to everyone by 2025, would also be bad politics.

(Source: BBC)

The everyday device in your home killing hundreds around the globe

When you think of things that might kill you, it’s unlikely that your phone springs to mind. We have bad news for you… your smartphone is killing you.

Perhaps because the Apple iPhone was only released in 2007, a lot of us have not yet grasped the full deleterious effects of ‘the device’, and the many similar not-so-smartphones the now clunky-seeming original spawned.

Countless numbers of people have been killed by their smartphones already, and we’re not talking about the tin-foil-hat brigade’s concerns about the effects of 5G, wi-fi and phone signals in general on our brains.

The most obvious example is all the people who are killed on our roads, not just because they were the ones stupidly looking at their phones while driving – Australians now believe it is the main reason for our rising road toll, with 32% of drivers admitting to reading text messages while driving, according to the Community Attitudes to Road Safety 2013 Survey Report – but because they ambled, zombie-like, into traffic while posting on Instagram.

The number of pedestrians killed on US roads has risen by a staggering 51% since 2009. In 2017, pedestrian fatalities in Australia jumped by 20% in a year, with police blaming the stupidity of smartphones.

If you haven’t noticed the number of people who try to cross roads while ignoring the approach of big heavy vehicles in favour of their tiny screens, it’s probably because you’ve been looking at your phone.

The RACQ would like to see new laws to fine people who cross the road while staring at a device. “We think that sort of offence is on its way. There’s no doubt about it,” spokesman Paul Turner said.

“Stand at an intersection in the CBD for half an hour and you’ll see five or 10 people just being saved or stopping themselves from walking out into traffic because they were looking down at their phone. When you tap them on the shoulder and they look up it’s as though they’ve been in some sort of daze because they are so engrossed in their phone.”

No doubt you’re congratulating yourself for not being like that yourself but, be honest, what is your relationship with your phone like? And even if it’s not getting you run over, how much harm is it doing you?

Dopamine and cortisol

Have you, for example, felt what’s known as ‘phantom vibrations’ from your phone? That sensation where your body is sure it’s detected a new message buzz, but you check and there’s nothing there? That strange and concerning sensation is caused by the state of hyper-vigilance you’ve no doubt found yourself in from time to time, when stressful/vital information is pouring into this now essential-for-life device, which is rarely more than a metre away from you.

The fact is, we are, as a species, becoming addicted to both the dopamine hits of satisfaction that our smartphones give us hundreds of times a day, while being simultaneously assaulted by the dangerous levels of cortisol they send coursing through our bodies.

That combination is affecting everything from the way we sleep to our attention span, our memory, our self-esteem, decision-making skills and our physical health. You’re probably aware that many apps, and phones themselves, are designed to be habit forming. Those Likes on Facebook and Instagram are designed to trigger happy chemicals in our brains, much the way poker machines do, and thus to make us want to keep checking them, endlessly.

No less an authority than Google noted in a report that: “Mobile devices loaded with social media, email and news apps” create “a constant sense of obligation, generating unintended personal stress”.

According to a study by a tracking app called Moment, the average American spends four hours a day staring at their phone. Unfortunately, not all the information our screens give us is positive, and when we’re getting, instead, irate emails from colleagues, for example, or other bad news, our bodies release cortisol, our fight-or-flight hormone.

Cortisol is designed to prime your body to react to physical threats – such as bears, or bullies – and it changes your body physically, upping your heart rate, frizzing your adrenaline and spiking your blood sugar. Unfortunately, your body also responds with cortisol when you’re being stressed emotionally. And smartphones can provide you with these moments, wherever you are, multiple times per hour.

“Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” says David Greenfield, the founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction.

“It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.” Checking the phone, of course, can just provide more bad news and thus you can get into a cycle that leaves you with chronically high levels of cortisol. And this can lead to all kinds of health issues, including heart attacks, dementia, diabetes and depression.

Dr Robert Lustig, author of The Hacking of The American Mind recently told The New York Times that “every chronic disease we know of is exacerbated by stress, and our phones are absolutely contributing to this”.

As bad as smartphones are for you, of course, you’ve only had it running your life for the past dozen years. Just think of what it’s doing to your children, and the entirety of the coming generations. Anyone over the age of 10 is already unable to imagine a world without smartphones, and as they grow into adolescence, they are likely to be gifted one of these dangerous yet vital devices by their own parents.

This is “like giving them cocaine or heroin”, according to David Gillespie, the author of Teen Brain – Why Screens Are Making Your Teenager Depressed, Anxious And Prone to Lifelong Addictive Illnesses – And How to Stop it Now.

Teens, addiction and anxiety caused by smartphones

Gillespie’s book is full of shocking insights, and data, which make perfect sense of the behaviour many young teens exhibit today, particularly if you’re brave or foolhardy enough to attempt to take a device off one. He points out that in puberty, as the prefrontal cortex expands, the human body turns off a system called GABA (Gamma aminobutyric acid), a kind of “general purpose braking system that stops us from becoming addicted to things”.

This is why the teen years are a terrible time to start drinking or smoking, or even having sex, and Gillespie points out that society has realised this, and had huge successes in those areas.

“Between 2007 and now, the rates of teenage pregnancy, and alcohol and cigarette use by teens all dropped – they’re all about half of what they were, it’s a huge achievement and I don’t know why we’re not talking more about it,” he says. “The rates of anxiety and depression for teenagers should also be halving but, instead, the rates of those things in teens have actually doubled over the same period.

“That tells us immediately that something is replacing those addictions. And what has replaced it is also addictive, as it has driven up mental illness in this life stage.” The reason, according to Gillespie, is that we are now giving every adolescent “devices that can run simulations of addictive behaviour, all the time”.

As he points out, software for smartphones and apps are designed to be addictive, to have the same “mesmeric effect” that poker machines have on those who are susceptible, only across a wider swathe of society. “There are millions of companies competing to be one of those five apps on your home screen that you click a hundred or a thousand times a day, and they want to find a way to get people to press that button by giving them a hit of dopamine every time they press it,” he says.

Teens are super susceptible, of course, but boys and girls are targeted in different ways. Young women, Gillespie’s research reveals, are rewarded by the drug oxytocin when “they are in a group of girls, and that group approves of them, they feel liked, and that gives them oxytocin, which is more powerful in girls than in boys”.

“A teenage girl is as sensitive as she will ever be to this and that’s why the creation of ‘approval porn’ has been so successful,” Gillespie adds.

“Until now, we’ve never been able to replicate this approval hit of having real people like you, but simulating that is what social media software does. All of the Facebooks, the Instagrams, they’re all high-speed simulators of social approval, and girls, really, really respond to that.”

Boys, however, are gripped by what Gillespie calls ‘danger porn’, because men are stimulated by risk and danger. “Which is why gambling is so popular; it’s that chance of losing, and the relief of surviving something that’s rewarding for boys – it’s also why they love roller-coasters,” he says.

“And a simulation of that is online gaming on your phone; the first-person shooter like Fortnite, those games are all designed around the concept of danger porn. It’s about survival and the relief of survival.”

Throw in the social aspect of being able to chat to your peers while playing, and the mobility of phone-based games, and you’ve got serious addiction on your hands.

As Gillespie says, these devices were designed from day one, by Steve Jobs and company, to be “beautiful, easy to use and hard to give up”. And, knowing how addictive they would become, Jobs famously declared that he wouldn’t let his own children near them.

“The Jobs thing came out by accident in an interview, he was asked how long he let his kids play with iPads and so on and he wasn’t expecting it and just blurted out that he wouldn’t let his children have them – what’s that saying? Don’t get high on your own supply,” Gillespie laughs. “But that’s become the trend in Silicon Valley these days, the executives instruct their nannies not to let their kids anywhere near these devices.

“And the research shows that rich people are less likely to give their devices to kids, because they can afford to pay humans to interact with their children instead. They consider it a low-class thing to give your children a screen.”

Regardless of what health effects you believe 5G networks might have in the coming years, it’s clear that the devices we’re already using, already addicted to, in fact, have had an enormous effect on society, and mortality, and they’ve only been around for little more than a decade. The device may yet prove to be a more potent example of humanity shooting itself in the foot than even the gun.

(Source: CEO)

Our growing intimacy with machines is rooted in the ancient practice of animism

Animism believes that there are many kinds of persons, only some of whom are humans.

When Alexa replied to my question about the weather by tacking on “Have a nice day,” I immediately shot back “You too,” and then stared into space, slightly embarrassed. I also found myself spontaneously shouting words of encouragement to Robbie, my Roomba vacuum, as I saw him passing down the hallway. And recently in Berkeley, California, a group of us on the sidewalk gathered around a cute four-wheeled KiwiBot – an autonomous food-delivery robot waiting for the traffic light to change. Some of us instinctively started talking to it in the sing-song voice you might use with a dog or a baby: “Who’s a good boy?”

We’re witnessing a major shift in traditional social life, but it’s not because we’re always online, or because our tech is becoming conscious, or because we’re getting AI lovers like Samantha in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her. To the contrary, we’re learning that humans can bond, form attachments and dedicate themselves to non-conscious objects or lifeless things with shocking ease. Our social emotions are now being hijacked by non-agents or jabbering objects such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri or IBM’s Watson, and we’re finding it effortless, comfortable and satisfying.

Tree worship is a common phenomenon in India. | Amit Dave/Reuters

The sophistication level of human-like simulation that AI needs in order to elicit our empathy and emotional entanglement is ridiculously low. A Japanese study in 2008 showed that elderly residents of a senior care home were quickly drawn into substantial social interactions with a rudimentary, toy-like robot seal named Paro. The seniors experienced increased motor and emotional stimulation with the bot, but also increased social interactions with each other regarding Paro. Tests showed that the reactions of the seniors’ vital organs to stress improved after the introduction of the robot. And in a test in 2018 at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, researchers built robots that administered “soft-warm hugs” to people, who reported feeling trust and affection for the robot – even saying that they felt “understood” by the robot. The point is not that robots are now such convincing counterfeit persons that we’re falling into relationships with them. It’s that humans are suckers for any vague sign of social connection. All of us are a hair’s breadth away from Tom Hanks’s character in Cast Away, who forges a deep bond with a volleyball he names Wilson.

Talking science

Recently, science has come to understand the emotions of social bonding, and I think it helps us understand why it’s so easy to fall into these “as-if intimacies” with things. Care or bonding is a function of oxytocin and endorphin surging in the brain when you spend time with another person, and it’s best when it’s mutual and they’re feeling it too. Non-human animals bond with us because they have the same brain chemistry process. But the system also works fine when the other person doesn’t feel it – and it even works fine when the other person isn’t even a “person”. You can bond with things that cannot bond back. Our emotions are not very discriminating and we imprint easily on anything that reduces the feeling of loneliness. But I think there’s a second important ingredient to understanding our relationship with tech.

The proliferation of devices is certainly amplifying our tendency for anthropomorphism, and many influential thinkers claim that this is a new and dangerous phenomenon, that we’re entering into a dehumanising “artificial intimacy” with gadgets, algorithms and interfaces. I respectfully disagree. What’s happening now is not new, and it’s more interesting than garden-variety alienation. We are returning to the oldest form of human cognition – the most ancient pre-scientific way of seeing the world: animism.

Animistic beliefs dominate the everyday lives of people in Southeast and East Asia, as I discovered while living there for several years. Local spirits, called neak ta in Cambodia, inhabit almost every farm, home, river, road and large tree. Thai people usually refer to these spirits as phii, and the Burmese call them nats. The next time you visit a Thai restaurant, notice the spirit house near the cash register or kitchen, probably decorated with offerings such as flowers, fruit, even a shot of alcohol. These offerings are designed to please neak ta and phii, but also to distract and pull mischievous spirits into the mini-homes, thereby saving the real homes from malady and misfortune. Animism was never entirely supplanted by modern beliefs, and we see it fancifully portrayed in the Japanese films of Hayao Miyazaki.

Like my relationship with Alexa, animists have the same as-if perspective toward their spirits. They understand that the shot glass of booze is not really consumed by the thankful ghost ‒ it’s still there the next day ‒ but they gently commit to it anyway.

Animism is strong in Asia and Africa, but really it is everywhere around the globe, just below the surface of more conventional official religions. In actual numbers and geographic spread, belief in nature spirits trounces monotheism, because even the one-godders are closet animists. Spend some time in New Orleans, with its voodoo and hoodoo cultures, and you’ll see that animism is alive and interwoven with mainstream religions such as Catholicism.

The word “animism” was first employed by the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor to describe the early “primitive” stage of human religion – a stage that was eventually supplanted by what was later called Axial Age monotheism, which in turn would be supplanted, Tylor hoped, by what we’d call Deism. Anthropologists today debate the usefulness of the term animism since folk religions are so diverse, but two essential features mark all animism: one, belief that there are “agents” or even persons in natural objects, artifacts, and geographic places; and two, belief that nature has purposes woven throughout it. Animism commits to the view that there are many kinds of persons in the world, only some of whom are humans.

Sigmund Freud typified the usual condescension about animism when he wrote in Totem and Taboo that “spirits and demons were nothing but the projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses”. But I want to extend the more charitable view of David Hume that we are all somewhat animistic – even secular humanists and science devotees. “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious.”

Old wisdom

Animism is not so much a set of beliefs as a form of cognition. I think we are all natural-born animists, and those of us in Western developed countries slowly learn to discount this mode of cognition in favour of a mechanical view of the world. Indigenous approaches to nature are dubbed uneducated or juvenile because they use agency and purpose to think about nature. However, some philosophers and psychologists are striking back, pointing out that animistic thinking reveals many of the subtle ecological relations in nature that mechanical approaches miss.

If animist thinking is childish and uneducated, then why are indigenous peoples so much better at surviving and thriving in local natural ecologies? Some kinds of animism are adaptive and aid our survival, because they focus our attention on ecological connections, but they also train our social intelligence to predict and respond to other agents. If your world is thick with other agents – all vying for their desires and goals – then you spend a lot of time organising, revising and strategising your own goals in a social space of many competing aims.

So our new “tech-animism” might not be detrimental at all. I might not really be helping the robot, and it might not be helping me, but behaving as if we’re actually relating – even bonding – keeps our empathic skills honed and ready for when it really counts. Immersion in tech relationships is not creating the loneliness epidemic. It’s a response to it. The actual causes of the loneliness epidemic started way before digital dominance. Our new animism ‒ animism 2.0 – might be quite helpful in keeping the social emotions and skills healthy enough for real human bonding, perspective-taking and empathy. Instead of dehumanising us, this tech-animism could actually be keeping us human.

(Source: Scroll)

An artist wheeled 99 smartphones around in a wagon to create fake traffic jams on Google Maps

An artist "hacked" Google Maps' traffic display — and all it took was a red wagon and 99 smartphones.

Simon Weckert toted the pile of smartphones down empty streets in Berlin. Every street he traversed suddenly appeared as a traffic-heavy red zone on Google Maps, rerouting drivers to avoid the streets, as shown in Weckert's YouTube video documenting the results.

Weckert essentially gamed the mechanism Google Maps uses to predict traffic, he said in an email to Business Insider.

A Google representative told Business Insider that the app determines traffic by continuously pinging smartphones that use location services and by using "contributions from the Google Maps community."

"We've launched the ability to distinguish between cars and motorcycles in several countries including India, Indonesia and Egypt, though we haven't quite cracked traveling by wagon," the representative said. 

"We appreciate seeing creative uses of Google Maps like this as it helps us make maps work better over time."

For Weckert's experiment, all 99 smartphones were turned on with Google Maps running.

"There is no such thing as neutral data. Data is always collected for a specific purpose, by a combination of people, technology, money, commerce, and government," Weckert said in an email to Business Insider.

Weckert said he carried out the experiment last summer but published the results this week in honor of the 15th birthday of Google Maps.

Weckert added that he wanted to draw attention to the blind trust that many people have in tech companies and platforms.

"Maps have the potential as an instrument of power for some intentions. They substitute political and military power," Weckert said. He added that "we are highly focused on" the data of apps like Google Maps "and tend to see them as objective ... thus data are viewed as the world itself, forgetting that the numbers are only representing a model of the world."

(Source: BI)

Half of UK 10-year-olds own a smartphone

Fifty per cent of the UK's 10-year-olds owned a smartphone in 2019, according to a report by media regulator Ofcom.

The amount of young phone owners doubled between the ages of nine and 10, which Ofcom dubbed "the age of digital independence".

In addition, 24% of 3 and 4-year-olds had their own tablet, and 15% of them were allowed to take it to bed.

Ofcom's annual report looks at the media habits of children, and the types of devices they are using.

The 2019 study was based on more than 3,200 interviews with children and parents around the UK.

"The mobile phone is the device of choice for children," said Yih-Choung Teh, strategy and research group director at Ofcom.

"I'm conscious that for these children who have never known a world without the internet, in many respects their online and offline worlds are indistinguishable."

The report also found that more older children were using social media to express their support for social causes and organisations, with 18% having shared or commented on a post, and one in ten having signed an online petition.

Ofcom dubbed this "the Greta effect" after the 17-year-old environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg.

The "Greta effect" has led to more older children supporting causes online.

Other key findings for 2019 included:

• 48% of girls aged 5-15 played online games, compared with 71% of boys. Boys spent twice as long playing, clocking up 14.5 hours per week, compared with 7.5 for girls
• Snapchat and Facebook remained the most popular social media platforms of older children, but 62% were also using WhatsApp (up from 43% in 2018)
• 99% of children aged 5-15 used a TV set, 27% used a smart speaker and 22% used a radio
• 80% of the children in the report watched video-on-demand, and 25% watched no live broadcast TV at all. One nine-year-old girl told researchers: "I don't really like the TV because you can't pick what channels are on it".

Ofcom also interviewed parents about their concerns. It found that 45% of parents thought the benefits of children using the internet outweighed the risks, but there was an overall increase in parental concern about young people seeing content that might lead them to self-harm.

Just under half (47%) of the parents spoken to were worried about pressure to spend money within games, especially on loot boxes, where the reward is not clear before purchase.

Of those parents with children aged between 5 and 15, 87% had sought advice about how to keep them safe online.

"We are seeing around half of 12-15 year olds saying they have seen hateful content online, and an increase in parents who are concerned about it," said Yih-Choung Teh.

"The good news is, more conversations about staying safe online are also happening across the country."

Following the report, children's charity the NSPCC called for independent regulators to force social media platforms to protect their users from viewing harmful material.

"While it's encouraging that parents are talking to their children about their media use, we must look to tech giants to protect their users and ensure they are a force for good not bad," said Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy.

(Source: BBC)

The phone call

After driving fifty miles on US 380 to McKinney, I take I-75 south toward the Ridgeview exit. I’m on my way to the cemetery, silk red roses in the passenger seat. In three days, it will be three years since my phone rang at nine twenty on a Saturday morning. My mother, telling me my father was gone.

I take a right toward the cemetery and follow the winding path to the tree. I park beside it.

As the first anniversary of my father’s death approached, my mother asked me to put roses on his grave: “I want him to have them for the day.” She wasn’t well enough to do it herself—the cancer, diagnosed not long after his death, had taken its last turn, though we didn’t know it then. When she died, fourteen months after my father, I swiped through the photos on her phone and found his grave, its mound of funeral flowers. He was buried on the first of February, and the dates on the photographs showed she had driven the hour there on the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth. Disbelief, I imagine, and the need to convince herself it was true.

My father died in the hotel room where my parents were staying in McKinney, Texas. A heart attack at eighty-three. He was gone before my mother could get to the phone. He was gone when the paramedics asked him his name. He was gone when the ambulance rushed away, my mother following in their car to the emergency room.

On the second anniversary of my father’s death, last year, my sixteen-year-old daughter, Indie, and I were at my parent’s house for the final time, packing boxes, going through drawers and closets, watching movers load the furniture we wanted before the estate sale. The day came and went.

I cross the grass to the headstone, the one my parents share. This is the first anniversary I have had the chance to really remember—the daze of a drive Indie and I made on 380 East that Saturday morning, the corners we turned in the ER until we found my mother in the doorway watching for us, my father’s body in the room behind her. I kneel down and press my fingertips to the date: January 28, 2017.

Indie’s at work today, so she’ll come to the cemetery by herself tomorrow. I will not write her grief here, only mine.

My father would—get a paper plate and fill it with Nilla wafers, then grab a knife and spread peanut butter on each one; race popsicle sticks with me in the rush of water along the curb after it rained; play his Jerry Lee Lewis albums loud enough to hear while he was in shower; spin our orange VW bug in the mall parking lot when it snowed (“Don’t tell your mother”); recount the entire plot of the movie he had gone to see by himself; prop his feet on the rubber rails of escalators as we descended, one foot on each side; call me whenever Titanic was on TV; follow me to my car every time I left to go back to college to tell me, “Remember why you’re there”; write me letters on yellow legal-pad pages; drive me to downtown Dallas and walk the 5K route while I ran; ask the piano player in Nordstrom to play “La Vie en Rose”; order a waffle, crisp, bacon, crisp; swim laps at dusk while Indie swam beside him.

Every time I visit the cemetery, I talk to my parents. I look at the tree, and I tell them things. But today, after I remove the poinsettias and walk them down to the dumpster, after I set the roses in the vase and arrange them until I can hear my mother saying, “Pretty,” I stand silent. I think about next year when Indie will be at college, and how, then, everyone will be gone.

I won’t mind being alone. I’ve always felt most myself when I’m by myself, but still, Indie will go in seven months, and her leaving will be another loss in a litany of losses. All of them, one after another. The soon of Indie’s leaving trembles like a last train car.

Across the way, a tractor bounces over the grass to dig a new grave.

Three days from now, on January 28, I will wake while it’s still dark, unable to sleep while the rain slows. I’ll turn over and back again, throwing back the covers, feeling dread. Later, I will sit with Indie at the kitchen table and tell her, “It’s as if I woke up and felt that phone call coming again.” And I will glance at the chair where my father always sat when I say, “The body has a memory.” Indie will nod, tell me she woke up in a cold sweat.

I will not tell her that after I left the cemetery, I drove to the Holiday Inn and Suites on I-75. Or that I pulled into the parking lot and drove around the four-story building and figured out there’s only one entrance to the hotel. Or that I parked, one of a few cars in the lot, and looked in every direction, wondering which one my father took on his last walk. I do not tell her how I stared at the automatic double doors of the entrance.

Instead, I will tell her about the popsicle sticks, the way Dad would count to three before we let them go, the way he ran alongside his stick, shouting, “Come on, my guy! Come on, my guy!” The way I laughed and ran with him.

(Source: The Paris Review)