9. Digging Deeper

Use your challenge statement to start some more focused secondary research. What are the main themes which are emerging?

For right now, it’s best for me to talk to anyone we can think of that’s in one of the two fields of smartphone addiction / sustainable lifestyle and relationships. I feel hard to find my own community to facilitate the conversation.

“Every conversation we get a little bit better at reading people, at striking up a conversation, and at maintaining a conversation,” says Roberts. “Some people are becoming conversational cowards. They lack the willingness to have difficult face-to-face conversations, and they aren’t cultivating those skills.”

In this Bank of America Survey, 29 percent of Americans chose text as their preferred method of conversing with others, compared to 40 percent of millennials. While 38 percent of Americans of all ages chose in person conversations as their top choice, compared to 33 percent of millennials.

“A lot of what used to be done face to face is now done via computer mediated communication and I think that’s sad because what we’ve lost is the humanness of contact and conversation,” suggests Roberts. “When we lose our ability to relate to people, to empathize with people, we care less about those people.”

It seems ironic that a device designed to enable communication could have a detrimental impact, but most of us are familiar with phubbing, even if we haven’t heard the term before – it’s a portmanteau of phone and snub.

“When some people start to feel insecure, they instantly look to their lifeline, their smartphones. They don’t realize that sometimes pregnant pauses and uncomfortable lulls in conversation are something to work through,” says Roberts.

There’s clearly a generational divide in our attitudes towards smartphones. What’s acceptable is changing, but we’re still figuring out the social rules, because this is still a relatively new technology. There’s a lot of hyperbole about the impact on millennials, but what about the next generation growing up with smartphones and the potential impact on parental relationships?